Local elections officials are sounding the alarm against further last-minute rule-making by the Georgia State Election Board, both in a Wednesday letter from their statewide professional association and in dozens of public comments at the board’s day-long Monday meeting.
“With less than 77 days until the presidential election, the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials (GAVREO) is urging the State Election Board (SEB) to halt the implementation of additional SEB election rules that would go into effect for the upcoming election,” the letter states.
GAVREO warned that further changes could imperil the smooth administration of the already contentious Nov. 5 general election. “GAVREO members are gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion for poll workers, absentee voting, advance voting and Election Day preparation,” the group wrote.
Hundreds of viewers tuned in for Monday’s virtual State Elections Board meeting. That included dozens of local elections officials expressing opposition to last-minute rule changes to the election certification process, including a proposed mandate that Election Day ballots be hand-counted at precincts on election night after the polls close.
The State Election Board is scheduled to vote on the hand-count rule at its next meeting on Sept. 20.
“Understand that poll workers arrive at the precincts at 5:30 am on election day,” Anita Tucker, the assistant secretary for the Forsyth County Board of Registrations and Elections, told the board in public comment.
“The odds of 159 counties getting the hand count right on the first try after 7 pm is zero. It is unreasonable to expect this of poll workers,” Tucker said, urging the board not to adopt the hand-count rule.
Georgia’s ballots are counted by machine. Paper ballot printouts serve as a backup to the electronically scanned ballots in case of a recount or audit.
Rebecca England, Greene County’s election director, raised another concern: security.
“One of the top priorities on Election Day is to keep a chain of custody of the ballots. My concern with this proposed rule is that the chain of custody could be compromised with ballots being handled by so many individuals on election night at our precincts,” she said.
Paulding County’s elections director, Deidre Holden, said the cost of hiring additional staff to execute a hand-count in time would be burdensome. She noted that Paulding has 135,790 registered voters.
“The additional cost to our county will be $7,000 — could be more, depending on the number of ballots that we have. Some counties, due to their already strained budgets, will not be able to afford this,” she said.
Michael Beach, who said he’d worked as a poll worker and assistant poll manager in DeKalb County for almost three years, called the proposed hand-count rule “duplicative and unnecessary.” What’s more, he said, it would introduce human errors and delays in reporting election results.
“As we know, confidence in elections is undermined when results are delayed. As a poll worker, we already check hourly for discrepancies between check-ins at the poll pads, voting at the touch screens, and ballot counts at the scanner in my precinct,” he said.
“The U.S. has been embroiled in election chaos for four years now, questioning whether election systems are secure,” Beach said. “Multitudes of lawsuits and accusations have been created, but at the end of the day, those efforts have failed, due to a total lack of hard supporting evidence, as seen over the past four years.”
“Adding more rules will never satisfy those who are convinced elections are not secure,” he added. “It only emboldens more and more layers of unneeded and potentially harmful changes.”
Other last-minute rules
The State Election Board in the past month has passed a number of new rules that critics say create more problems than they solve.
Control of the five-person board is decidedly in the hands of three pro-Trump Republicans who constitute a voting majority. The trio of Janice Johnston, Janelle King, and Rick Jeffares were praised by no less than former President Donald Trump himself at his Atlanta rally on Aug. 3.
The board has already passed rules that include empowering Georgia’s 159 county elections offices to conduct ‘reasonable inquiry’ prior to certification. Critics contend that deputizing county elections officials to perform ballot investigations will be used to delay certifying results a partisan board might not like. The board’s three-member, pro-Trump majority approved that rule on Aug. 6.
Another rule, passed Monday, is for mandatory signage at polling places saying that only U.S. citizens may vote – even though no non-citizens were found to have voted in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. Of the 22 alleged voter-fraud cases in Georgia tracked by the conservative Heritage Foundation since 1997, only one case involved a voter who was illegally registered to vote — a Republican party official.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2022 flagged 1,634 cases of potential non–citizens attempting to register to vote. But that audit confirmed that the measures currently in place to prevent non-citizen voter registrations are, in fact, working. “None of these individuals have cast ballots in Georgia elections,” the audit found.
In a statement last week, Raffensperger, a Republican, chided the board for its “eleventh hour” and “activist” rule-making. Like the county elections officials, he raised concerns that the proposed hand-count rule would undermine ballot security and that it, along with the new rule allowing county election officials to hold up ballot certification, would add delays that undermine the public’s confidence in the election.
Democrats are also pushing back on the rule changes. The former chair of the Fulton County Elections Board, Cathy Woolard, filed an ethics complaint with Gov. Brian Kemp on Aug. 16 against board members Johnston, King and Jeffares, saying they’ve violated state law and that their actions “advance their own political preferences.”
Woolard’s letter — first reported by Lawfare’s Anna Bower — also points out that Jeffares is jockeying for a position in a second Trump administration, if the former president is reelected.
State Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes, a Democrat who represents part of Gwinnett County, filed a formal complaint on Aug. 19 with Kemp that demanded the removal of Johnston, King, and Jeffares for violating the state’s ethics code and open meetings law.
Her complaint alleges that the rule allowing county elections officials to delay certifying results constitutes election interference, that the three board members are “illegally coordinating” with the Georgia Republican Party, and that they held a “secret meeting” on July 12 in violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act.
WANT TO WEIGH IN ON THESE RULE CHANGES?
- Contact your county elections board
- Contact the State Election Board
- Contact Gov. Brian Kemp’s office
- Attend and provide public comment at the next State Election Board meeting on Sept. 20. Information for attending the meeting will be posted closer to the meeting date here.
It is utterly ridiculous that the election officials who have such close ties with Trump campaign can have any credibility on election security. I don’t trust that they would have the best interest of the voters in handling the election tallies.