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One expert warned that requiring hand-counted ballots "could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results" if Vice President Kamala Harris wins Georgia.
Forty-five days before U.S. elections and less than a month before early voting begins, former President Donald Trump's allies on the Georgia State Election Board on Friday passed a rule requiring county officials in the key swing state to count all ballots by hand, a move one expert said could "be exploited by election deniers" like Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee.
The board's pro-Trump majority voted 3-2 in favor of requiring hand counts, with Chair John Fervier, an Independent, casting one of the two dissenting votes.
"The overwhelming number of election officials that have reached out to me have been opposed to this," Fervier said in a statement. "There are several things that concern me about this. No. 1, I do think it's too close to the election. I do. I think that it's too late to train a lot of poll workers that have already started their training processes."
Fervier also said the board overstepped its authority by passing the new rule.
"This board is an administrative body, not a legislative body," he explained. "If the Legislature had wanted this, they would have put it in the statute. This board is not here to make law. We're here to interpret law, and I don't see any place in statute, where [it mentions] hand counting the ballots after they come out of the machines."
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board's lone Democrat, told Mother Jones' Ari Berman that "we're so far off the deep end of sanity here."
"It's a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training," she added.
Berman warned that the rule change "could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results" if Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, wins the state. He added that the new rule could even help Republicans "rig the state for Trump."
Trump, who lost Georgia to President Joe Biden by less than half a percentage point in 2020, infamously asked Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" in his favor. This prompted Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to launch an investigation that led to 13 criminal counts against Trump and numerous alleged co-conspirators for violations of the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act related to their participation in a sprawling "criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the election.
In June, the Georgia Court of Appeals paused the case, in which judges have dismissed multiple counts against Trump and his co-defendants, four of whom have pleaded guilty.
Republican Georgia officials including Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr have also voiced concerns about hand counts.
However, Janelle King, a board member who supports Trump, said Friday that "what I don't want to do is set a precedent that we are OK with speed over accuracy."
Voting rights advocates decried the new rule.
"By mandating hand counts that can magnify discrepancies and potentially delay results, the Georgia State Election Board has taken another dangerous step to create doubt in our election process where there should be none," Kristin Nabers, Georgia state director at the advocacy group All Voting Is Local—which warned that the board is "purposely setting up [the] system to fail"—said in a statement Friday.
"Counting thousands of ballots by hand will be an incredibly tedious, expensive, and possibly error-prone process," she continued. "Any human errors can be exploited by election deniers to sow distrust and decrease confidence in our elections and in the hard-working election officials that run them."
"Many election workers have spoken recently about the threats they are facing from the conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that our elections are fair, and these rules just add fuel to that fire," Nabers related.
"Implementing these drastic changes less than a month before the start of early voting means counties may have to restart their training of poll workers," she added. "These unnecessary hand counts are setting the county election offices up for failure. Today, we witnessed the board allow election deniers to complicate elections in the Peach State even further with their baseless conspiracy theories."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said that "instead of providing better access to the polls, extremists in Georgia are changing the rules just over a month before we elect new leaders."
"This new policy will only create more distrust of our safe and secure election system, burden election workers, and slow the vote count," she added.
It's not just Georgia. As Public Citizen noted Friday, "Since 2020, several states have implemented new voter restrictions to suppress turnout."
"Georgia, Texas, Montana, and Iowa have added new voter-restriction policies such as shortening early voting windows, requiring new voter registration if voters don't participate in the previous election, forbidding automatic mailing absentee ballot applications, and requiring IDs at the polls," the group noted. "States have also purged voter roles and even sued to try to prevent voter registration efforts."
In Georgia, which enacted a Republican-led voter suppression law in 2021, voters experienced a dramatic increase in mail-in ballot rejections during subsequent municipal elections.
As Common Dreams reported at the time, the law imposed strict voter identification requirements, significantly limited the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, eliminated mobile voting vans, and made it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.
From ordering police raids on civil rights workers to spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud, the Republican Party is finding new ways to suppress the votes of people of color.
A Florida resident named Isaac Menasche received a home visit this September from a police officer asking whether he’d signed a petition for a ballot measure.
The petition, which Menasche had indeed signed, was for a November initiative overturning a strict abortion ban that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those signatures using state-funded cops. According to the Tampa Bay Times, state law enforcement officers have visited the homes of other signers as well.
DeSantis created an elections police unit in 2022 to investigate so-called election crimes. By that August, he’d arrested 20 “elections criminals” for allegedly voting improperly in the 2020 election.
If their rhetoric weren’t so dangerous, it would be funny that Trump is a felon and Musk is an immigrant.
A majority of those arrested—some at gunpoint—were Black. Most had been formerly incarcerated and thought they were eligible to vote, since Floridians had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure restoring their voting rights. But DeSantis and his GOP allies in the state legislature used every maneuver they could to thwart that popular decision.
If anyone is breaking voting laws intentionally in Florida and elsewhere, it’s white conservatives who’ve been caught engaging in deliberate voter fraud numerous times, including attempting to vote multiple times and voting under the names of their dead spouses.
Further, given that voter intimidation is patently illegal, DeSantis is clearly the one flouting laws.
DeSantis’ fellow Republican, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is on a similar crusade. He recently authorized police raids on the homes of people associated with a Latino civil rights group called the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), including grandparents in their 70s and 80s.
Like DeSantis, Paxton has been aggressively prosecuting voters of color based on little to no evidence of nefarious intent. The most egregious example is the conviction and harsh sentencing of a Black voter named Crystal Mason. Mason spent six years fighting her case and was acquitted last May because of a lack of evidence.
Bruce Zuchowski, a Republican county sheriff in Ohio, called on supporters to “write down all the addresses of the people who had [Kamala Harris] signs in their yards” so they can be forced to take in migrants—whom he called, in a garbled Facebook post, “human locusts.” Local residents say they feel intimidated.
It’s not just government officials. The extremist Heritage Foundation sent staffers to the homes of Georgia residents thought to be immigrants, in an effort to find voter fraud where none existed. (This is the same behind Project 2025, a playbook for a future Republican president promising the dystopian destruction of federally funded programs.)
And of course, the loudest and most bizarre conspiracy theories come from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who invokes non-existent fraud to explain why he lost the 2020 election. His billionaire backer Elon Musk has added fuel to the fire by amplifying these false claims.
If their rhetoric weren’t so dangerous, it would be funny that Trump is a felon and Musk is an immigrant.
There’s a long and disturbing history of voter suppression aimed at communities of color, from poll taxes to lynchings. Although the 1965 Voting Rights Act was aimed at preventing such race-based suppression, right-wing justices on the Supreme Court gutted parts of the law, opening the door to systematic disenfranchisement and intimidation.
Numerous investigations of voter fraud claims have repeatedly been found to be utterly baseless. So why do Republicans make them?
As a federal judge in Florida concluded, “For the past 20 years, the majority in the Florida Legislature has attacked the voting rights of its Black constituents. They have done so… as part of a cynical effort to suppress turnout.” And that’s precisely the point.
There are strict laws in place against voter intimidation. And while the Biden administration is ready to enforce them with a small army of lawyers, it’s critical that voters know their own rights and ask for help if they believe their right to vote is under threat.
"As long as House Republicans continue pushing Project 2025 funding bills, they will continue pushing our nation towards a government shutdown," said Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected a GOP resolution that would have punted a fight over government funding until after the next president takes office and pushed through a noxious voter suppression measure backed by Republican nominee Donald Trump.
The final vote was 202-220, with 14 Republicans joining nearly every member of the House Democratic caucus in voting against the legislation. GOP opponents of the bill included far-right lawmakers who want to slash spending.
Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Don Davis (D-N.C.), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) broke with their party and backed the Republican continuing resolution, which would have largely extended government funding at current levels into March.
With Trump's backing, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to attach to the continuing resolution the SAVE Act, legislation purportedly aimed at preventing noncitizens from voting—which is already illegal. Voting rights advocates have condemned the SAVE Act as an "unnecessary and dangerous" bill that would "make it harder for voters of color and naturalized citizens to register to vote."
"Instead of working with Democrats to fund the government, House Republicans tied themselves into knots trying to give Trump what he wants."
House Democrats said Wednesday that the failure of the GOP continuing resolution was an inevitable consequence of the party's decision to push extremist spending bills instead of working on a bipartisan solution to government funding.
The government will shut down on October 1 unless Congress acts. Johnson said leading up to Wednesday's vote that there is "no Plan B."
"Once again, the House Republican majority has failed at its most basic tasks while trying to force Trump's extreme and unpopular Project 2025 agenda on the American people," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee. "Everyone in Washington, Democrats and Republicans, knew this ill-conceived continuing resolution was destined to fail. Why we spent a week and a half considering a partisan bill, just days from a government shutdown, is beyond comprehension."
"We have seven legislative days to keep the government open," she continued. "The time to begin negotiations on a continuing resolution that can gain the support of Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate was last week—but right now will suffice, if Republicans are willing to meet us at the table and actually govern."
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said late Wednesday that "as long as House Republicans continue pushing Project 2025 funding bills, they will continue pushing our nation towards a government shutdown."
"Trump said he'd 'shut down the government in a heartbeat' to push his Project 2025 agenda—and instead of working with Democrats to fund the government, House Republicans tied themselves into knots trying to give Trump what he wants," said Boyle. "Just as they've done for the last two years, House Republicans have proven they're more interested in imposing Trump's dangerous agenda than lifting a finger to help middle-class families and keep our government open. American families deserve better than this extreme bill and they deserve better than House Republicans."
Democratic lawmakers are reportedly expected to propose a clean three-month extension of government funding to avert a shutdown and buy time to negotiate a longer-term deal on government spending.
Ahead of Wednesday's vote, DeLauro warned that House Republicans believe delaying the government funding fight until March 2025 would give them "more leverage to force their unpopular cuts to services that American families depend on to make ends meet."
"This bill is an admission that a House Republican majority cannot govern," said DeLauro. "They would rather gamble on an intervening election than attempt to complete their work on time."