What does the brand new rule say?
The new rule requires three ballot employees in every precinct to separate forged ballots into stacks of fifty and rely them by hand. Every ballot employee should rely all of the ballots till they arrive on the similar complete independently. They’re counting the entire variety of ballots, not tallying the votes for candidates on the ballots. The rely should both start on election evening or the subsequent day.
As soon as all three employees attain the identical complete, they need to signal a doc that has the serial quantity on the poll counting machine, election identify and the time and date of the hand rely. If the entire variety of ballots doesn’t match the numbers on the ballot pads used to test voters in, in addition to the voting machine and scanners, the ballot supervisor should instantly decide the explanation for the inconsistency and proper it, if attainable. The rule doesn’t outline what correcting any inconsistency will entail.
The rule solely applies to ballots forged on election day. The state board of elections voted to place off contemplating an analogous rule that might apply to early votes.
Why is that this controversial?
Election officers throughout the state and voting rights teams have nearly universally opposed the rule. They are saying that it’s pointless, will delay the reporting of election outcomes and opens the door to confusion and misinformation after voting has concluded.
“Misguided efforts to impose new procedures like hand counting ballots at polling areas make it doubtless that Georgians is not going to know the outcomes on election evening,” the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger mentioned in a press release in August. “Moreover, having ballot employees deal with ballots at polling areas after they’ve been voted introduces a brand new and vital danger to chain of custody procedures.
“Efforts to vary these legal guidelines by unelected bureaucrats on the eve of the election introduces the chance for error, misplaced or stolen ballots, and fraud,” he mentioned.
Polls in Georgia shut at 7pm native time on election evening and a brand new legislation in Georgia requires counties to report their early and mail-in votes by 8pm. However the hand rely rule may imply that counties don’t report their election day votes till a lot later within the night, leaving a variety of uncertainty about what’s happening, mentioned Travis Doss, the chief director of the board of elections in Richmond county, Georgia.
“There’s the potential of it being perceived that the votes aren’t safe or not being correct due to a possible delay,” mentioned Doss, who can also be the president of the Georgia Affiliation of Voter Registration and Election Officers.
His “greatest, greatest, greatest concern” is that the preliminary outcomes at 8pm will present one candidate forward, however then the outcomes will swap as extra votes are available in. A number of swings like this occurred in 2020, and it continues to be gas for individuals who consider the 2020 election was stolen.
“That’s when the conspiracy theorists are going to begin saying that, properly, that’s as a result of they noticed that the individual was dropping. And so now they’ve been, you understand, making up votes, creating votes and whatnot.”
“That simply creates a useless zone the place people say, properly, they usually report outcomes by now. We don’t see them but.There have to be one thing happening,” mentioned Joseph Kirk, the election director in Bartow county. “Irrespective of how many individuals are observing me, regardless of what number of, how clear I’m and what’s occurring, individuals are going to consider there’s one thing fallacious as a result of stuff’s been delayed.”
The rule will doubtless end in a delay of reporting from smaller counties, who could not have the assets to have “runners” take reminiscence playing cards from poll scanners and convey them again to the central workplace for reporting quickly after the polls shut.
“Some counties have the infrastructure in place to convey the outcomes again to the central workplace as quickly as attainable and have for years, however the majority of us don’t and every thing comes again on the similar time,” Kirk mentioned. He additional added he didn’t plan on having election employees make a number of journeys. “There received’t be any outcomes from my polls till the hand rely is full at that location,” he mentioned.
Election officers additionally say the hand rely is pointless as a result of they already often test that the variety of voters checking in matches with the variety of ballots being printed and tabulated. Precincts are additionally already required to have an individual who stands at every scanner as a voter places their poll in, so if there was a problem with tabulation, they’d catch it, Kirk mentioned.
“These numbers are checked and rechecked and verified all all through the day to just be sure you know the numbers are matching up as they go,” Doss mentioned. “It’s not open at 7am after which at 7pm impulsively an enormous shock … it’s an ongoing factor the place [equipment is] consistently being monitored to guarantee that all of the gear is working correctly and … the numbers are principally matching up all through the day.”
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