The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Party of Georgia have jointly filed a lawsuit against the Georgia State Election Board (SEB), challenging a new rule that requires the hand counting of ballots on election night.
The SEB rule, which passed by a 3-2 vote across ideological lines (with all three members in favor being conservative Trump supporters) requires poll managers and two additional workers at each precinct in the state to count ballots by hand on election night after they’ve been run through a voting machine, to ensure both counts result in the same number.
All three individuals at each precinct must agree on the final count totals before results can be submitted — and if there is an inconsistency between the hand count and the machine count numbers, they must determine why the vote was wrong and correct it, if they can.
Ostensibly, the rule is meant to ensure vote totals being counted by machines are accurate. However, the rule change, in conjunction with another rule passed by the SEB earlier this year, could allow for election results to be delayed into the next day, and possibly for weeks, potentially resulting in missed deadlines to have the voting outcomes submitted to the full state’s totals.
Ironically, the process also makes election fraud easier to carry out. An overzealous local election official, for example, hoping to help a political candidate “win” a race in the state — including Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes that are up for grabs in the presidential race — could abuse the new rule in order to do so, under false claims of trying to root out election fraud.
Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are essentially tied in the contest for president within Georgia. Any delays that result in votes not being counted could hurt either candidate’s chances of winning.
The DNC and the Democratic Party of Georgia submitted their lawsuit against the rule change earlier this week, filing their complaint to the Fulton County Superior Court based in Atlanta. The two Democratic entities said that the rule “adds an additional hurdle to Georgia’s established process for collecting and tabulating ballots,” making it so poll workers have to take an additional, unnecessary step before submitting votes to the state.
The rule is also too ambiguous, their brief contends, as it’s unclear how exactly poll workers would “resolve” any discrepancies between hand count ballots and machine counts. (Statistically, counting ballots by hand produces wrong outcomes more often than machines do.)
Democrats also argued within their lawsuit that this isn’t a partisan issue, and that Republican state lawmakers — including Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans — have expressed concerns about the legality of the rule.
“We agree with Georgia’s Republican Attorney General and Secretary of State: This rule is unproductive and unlawful, and we are fighting it,” Quentin Fulks, the Harris campaign’s principal deputy campaign manager, said in a statement. “Democrats are stepping in to ensure that Georgia voters can cast their ballots knowing that they will be counted in a free and fair election.”
The lawsuit also alleges that the State Election Board (SEB) had no authority to pass the rule in the first place. State law requires the SEB to only “‘carry into effect a law already passed’ or otherwise ‘administer and effectuate an existing enactment'” of the state legislature, the lawsuit says, adding that, “Nothing in the Election Code permits the kind of hand counting contemplated by the Hand Count Rule.”
Essentially, the board “engineered a…form of pre-certification hand counting with no statutory basis for doing so,” the Democratic groups said.
“To protect the sanctity of the state’s laws and to prevent election night chaos, this Court should declare that the Hand Count Rule exceeds SEB’s statutory authority,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit’s chances at success are currently unclear. It’s likely that a judge will place an injunction on the case, which — pending a judicial hearing and later, a decision — could extend the question (and thus, enforcement of the new rule) beyond the current election season. With five weeks to go until Election Day, multiple changes regarding whether or not the rule is implemented could disrupt or confuse election workers throughout the state.