The last-minute change to swing state election rules in the US is worrying some

In the town of Leesburg, Georgia, a little more than a dozen election workers sit at card tables, each leafing through stacks of 50 blank pieces of paper and practicing counting ballots by hand.

With the US presidential election just weeks away, the Georgia State Election Board, led by a pro-Donald Trump majority, in September passed a controversial requirement that counties manually count their ballots by hand, a move that has caused concern in the closely watched swing state.

Veronica Johnson, who leads the training as Lee County’s director of elections and registration, says counting ballots by hand likely won’t cause major operational problems in her small county.

But logistics are far from the only concern for election officials.

Georgia officials on both sides of the political spectrum say the count is not only unnecessary — machines are already counting the ballots — but also a potential tool to sow doubt by slowing the process and creating space for disinformation if error-prone human counting discrepancies arise.

“I don’t think it’s necessary. I have no problem saying that. I think we’re already balancing our numbers in our districts here in Lee County,” Johnson told AFP.

The change is all the more notable considering Republican candidate Trump allegedly rigged the state’s election in 2020 and pressured Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.

“Misguided”

Lee is one of Georgia’s 159 counties, which include major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta and rural areas such as the Leesburg area, and whose populations range from majority white to majority black.

Like many of its rural counterparts, Lee County voted heavily for Trump in 2020, receiving 72 percent of its vote.

Poll workers like those who attended the training will be stationed in the county’s 10 precincts on November 5, when US voters will choose between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as the candidate in hundreds of rounds of voting.

Because of the lawsuits, Johnson isn’t sure whether there will actually be a hand count.

“Honestly, every election official I know really just wants to serve the people and not get bogged down by the political consequences,” she said, emphasizing that ballots have already been counted by machine three times.

Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the rule change “misguided” and said that “activists seeking to force last-minute changes to election procedures” only “undermine voter confidence and burden poll workers” during the election Republican Attorney General of Georgia declared the new rule is probably illegal.

The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia filed a lawsuit last week with support from the Harris campaign to block the rule.

“Unreliable”

The state election committee passed the law with three votes to two. Proponents were staunch Trump supporters whom the ex-president praised as “pit bulls” fighting for “victory.”

Along the same lines, the board approved another rule in August that allows county election boards to conduct a “reasonable investigation” before certifying results.

Like the hand counting requirement, the measure is being challenged in court, with critics particularly concerned about the vagueness of the word “reasonable.”

Mitchell Brown, director of the election administration program at Auburn University in Alabama, told Agence France-Presse such a rule was unnecessary because election officials “hold regular meetings where they go over documentation and information with the certifying body.”

“The bigger and more interesting question to me is: What happens if an entity chooses not to certify?”

Back in Lee County, Donna Mathis, who has been a poll worker since 2018, noted that “the country is so very divided.”

When asked about the hand count and the rule for a reasonable investigation, she said, “The hand count doesn’t bother me,” considering how quickly they were able to tabulate the votes.

But “I think you can ask too much, it ties things up,” she added. “People are just so suspicious that they question everything.”