The Georgia Board of Elections voted Friday to approve a new rule that requires poll workers to count ballots by hand.
The board voted 3-2 to approve the rule, going against the advice of the state attorney general’s office, the secretary of state’s office and the county election officials association. Three board members who were praised by former President Donald Trump at a rally last month in Atlanta voted to approve the measure.
In a memo sent to election board members Thursday by state Attorney General Chris Carr’s office, he said no provision of state law allows for ballot counts to be hand-counted at the precinct level before the ballots are brought to the county elections supervisor for counting. As a result, the memo says, the rule is “unrelated to any law” and is “likely the exact type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do.”
The new rule requires that the number of ballots — not the number of votes — at each polling station be counted by three separate poll workers until the number of votes at each station is equal. If the scanner has more than 750 ballots at the end of voting, the polling station manager can decide to start counting the next day.
Several county election officials who spoke out against the rule during the public comment period leading up to the vote warned that having to manually count ballots at polling places could delay the reporting of election night results. They also expressed concern about placing an additional burden on poll workers who have already been working long days.