Democrats sue Georgia election board over new ballot hand-count rule

Democrats sued the Georgia state election board on Monday over a new rule requiring officials to hand-count ballots cast on election day, asking a state court to declare it unlawful and block it from going into effect.

The suit, filed in Fulton county superior court by both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia, takes aim at a rule adopted in a 3-2 vote by the state election board on 20 September. The rule requires the poll manager and a team of two other workers in each voting precinct to separate ballots into stacks of 50 and hand-count them. They must all agree on the total count and ensure that it matches the totals from the machine tabulation. If there is an inconsistency, they are required to determine the reason and correct it, if possible.

The rule has received widespread pushback from election officials in the state and voting rights groups, who are concerned the process could lead to delays and confusion after election night and cause chain-of-custody issues. Experts have long pointed out that hand-counts are less reliable than machine counts. The concern over post-election chaos is particularly acute in Georgia, a battleground state in this year’s presidential election.

“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 [the state election board’s] statutory authority and enjoin that rule from going into effect,” the complaint says.

The new rule is illegal for several reasons, the suit claims. First, there is no hand-count requirement outlined in Georgia law, and the state election board cannot enact requirements beyond what is written in state statute, lawyers wrote. Second, imposing a hand-count this close to an election would cause disorder, going against the board’s mandate to ensure orderly elections, the complaint says. Last, Democrats claim the board did not follow proper procedures to enact the measures.

Even before the board passed the law, Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general, advised the board that the new requirement was probably illegal. “The statutes upon which these rules rely do not reflect any provision enacted by the General Assembly for the hand-counting of ballots prior to tabulation,” he wrote in a memo.

The rule is one of several that a new, pro-Trump majority on the state election board has enacted this year. Other rules allow local election officials to undertake an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results and require local officials to explain any inconsistencies between the total number of voters who check in and the number of ballots cast in a precinct. Trump publicly praised the three board members at a rally earlier this year, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.

Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, said in a statement that Democrats were stepping in to ensure a free and fair election.

“As Donald Trump invents facts to try to sow doubt in our elections, his Maga allies in Georgia passed a new rule just weeks before election day that will obstruct the process of counting votes so they can complain when voters reject Trump at the polls,” Fulks said. “We agree with Georgia’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state: This rule is unproductive and unlawful, and we are fighting it.”

In 2020, when two hand-counts of the vote reaffirmed Joe Biden’s win, Trump still sought to overturn the election results. He asked Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, to find him 11,780 votes, enough to switch the results in the state.

In addition to the Democratic party, the other plaintiffs in the suit are members of the local election boards in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Forsyth counties – all hubs near the Atlanta area poised to play a major role in determining the winner of the election in Georgia this year.