The Muscogee County Board of Elections and Registration has sued the State Election Board in Georgia to block a new rule requiring a hand count of ballots.
The lawsuit says the state board has moved too late in the process to make this change and it will “dramatically” alter election work.
“At the eleventh hour before a Presidential election, the SEB strayed from its charter,” the lawsuit says. “Well after county board of elections have finalized budgets, hired and trained staff, and printed and begun to mail ballots, the SEB has adopted new rules that dramatically change election operations and impose onerous and new obligations on election administrators throughout Georgia.”
The Muscogee elections board filed the lawsuit Wednesday in the county’s Superior Court.
The lawsuit notes that at the State Elections Board’s Sept. 20 meeting, “dozens of public commenters objected to the passage of the rules, for a myriad of reasons, and stressed that one rule in particular, requiring hand-counting of all ballots, would make the election less secure by needlessly introducing human error and disrupting the chain of custody of the ballots.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare that the hand-counting rule violates Georgia law. It also seeks an injunction to prevent the rule from being implement during the 2024 election.
Election Day is Nov. 5 this year, but early voting starts Oct. 15 in Georgia.
The lawsuit contends implementing the new rule would require extra expense, a diversion of resources and additional planning. It also insists the Muscogee elections board can’t comply with the new rule and all of Georgia election law.
Complying with the hand-counting rule contradicts a state law which mandates that, after completing the required accounting and related documentation for a precinct, “the poll manager and at least one assistant manager shall … immediately deliver all required documentation and election materials to the election superintendent,” the lawsuit says.
But the hand-counting rule would delay election results, the lawsuit says, “which increases voter distrust in the results. Hand-counting also introduces more possibilities for human error, which creates misinformation about the certainty of the election results.”
Mike Coan, executive director of the Georgia Election Board, told the Ledger-Enquirer that although he hasn’t seen the lawsuit, the objections raised about the hand-counting rule are “much ado about nothing.”
Coan emphasized the new rule requires hand counts at each precinct to determine the total number of ballots cast to see whether that figure matches the total number of ballots tabulated by the electronic scanner. The official vote tally for each candidate comes from the electronic scanner, not the hand count, he said.
“This ensures election integrity by starting at the base level, the precinct level, to ensure that the number of ballots equals the number of ballots in the scanner,” Coan said.
Coan estimated at least 20-30 of Georgia’s 159 counties have been doing such hand counts on their own because state law hasn’t prohibited that practice. This new rule now mandates it.
“It basically makes it uniform statewide,” he said.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with the Ledger-Enquirer.
