The Republican-controlled Georgian state election board had voted on Friday to require a labor-intensive hand count of the probable millions of ballots in November’s election.
Voting rights advocates have said that this move could cause delays, introduce errors and lay the groundwork for spurious election challenges.
According to Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, (a left-leaning public policy institute), the hand count rule, passed in a 3-2 vote, will make Georgia the only state in the United States to enact such a requirement as part of the normal process of organising results.
Note that Georgia is one of seven ‘battleground’ states likely to determine the November 5 contest between Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, the Vice President, Kamala Harris.
This development is among the many decisions the state’s five-member board has passed recently, including a slew of election law changes sponsored by three conservative members praised by Trump.
Civil rights groups have said that those changes could allow rogue county election board members to either delay or deny certification of election results, throwing the state’s vote into chaos.
Meanwhile, Democrats have filed a lawsuit to challenge two of the certification rules, and a state judge has scheduled a non-jury trial for October 1st.
