Georgia’s Election Board passed a rule Sept. 20 that requires election officials to hand-count all ballots cast on election day, despite opposition from the Republican secretary of state and attorney general and evidence that hand-counting is less effective and more expensive.
The new rule requires the poll manager of a polling location and two observers to hand-count the paper ballots to compare with the machine count. This applies to every polling location in Georgia’s 159 counties, the second highest amount in the nation following Texas.
The rule is being challenged by a Republican-led group in court that claims the election board has gone outside its legal authority to adopt the rules and is scheduled for a hearing Oct. 4.
Beyond the logistical issues of finding thousands of election workers, the last-minute rule changes are reflective of a much more sinister narrative being perpetuated across the country.
Former President Donald Trump has repeated false claims of a stolen election unwaveringly since his defeat at the polls in 2020, especially about Georgia, where an ongoing fraud case alleges Trump and allies conspired to interfere in the election results. Just like in 2020, Georgia is set to be a key swing state in the Nov. 5 election.
It is not a coincidence that Trump-supporting election board members pushed the rule so close to the election, nor that Trump has been espousing racist and antisemitic rhetoric on the campaign trail to further stoke the flames of his base into distrust and hate. They do not have any evidence to back these claims and rely entirely on platforming bigoted conspiracy theories meant to further divide the country.
Trump and allies buying into and fueling these conspiracies is not new by any means, but the veracity of GOP challenges and last-minute changes to election rules leading up to the presidential election are significant. They are also ironic, considering in his speech to supporters Jan. 6, 2021, Trump berated Democrats for making changes to voting methods during the coronavirus pandemic.
“In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures,” Trump said. “So, just in a nutshell, you can’t make a change or voting for a federal election unless the state legislature approves it. No judge can do it. Nobody can do it. Only a legislature.”
It seems this logic doesn’t follow when Republicans are the ones making changes to election rules.
Election workers have continuously faced threats and violence since the 2020 election that were incited in no small part due to the rhetoric surrounding elections Trump and his allies have used. In Georgia, officials have already begun to increase security training for poll workers and installed panic buttons that connect to 911 dispatchers.
Forcing election workers to re-learn procedures with limited time because of a rule change only adds to the stress they are under, further leading to delays in calculating ballot results.
The process of hand-counting votes is also tedious and repetitive, which leads to human error, according to a Washington Post op-ed by Charles Stewart III, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab. Computers are built for tasks that humans cannot accomplish reliably, and results from a study co-authored by Stewart in 2018 showed machine counts were more accurate than hand counting.
Stewart’s study also found that notable discrepancies rarely came up. Discrepancies only occurred when poll workers stopped counting because they were too tired to continue or they considered counting write-in ballots “irrelevant.”
Faith in election administration and the election system among Republicans has drastically fallen since 2022, with only 28% of Republicans polled by Gallup saying they were confident that this year’s votes for president would be “accurately cast and counted.” There is a significant partisan gap in these results, with 84% of Democrats saying they were confident the election would be accurate.
Trump’s baseless claims about widespread election fraud are a preemptive move to set himself and other Republicans up to challenge results should they lose their races Nov. 5. They are undemocratic, unfounded and an unfortunate reality that must be combatted from every angle to ensure a fair, accurate election process for all Americans.
