This week, Democrats sued Georgia’s State Election Board, saying that a new rule that demands counties to count votes by hand at polling places on election day will let “bad-faith players claim that fraud has altered election results.”
There has been a long-running court battle between the Democrat Party and Georgia’s elections board over a number of new laws that opponents say will lead to “chaos” in the state after the election. The new case makes that fight even worse.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is supporting the case, which says that the board went beyond its authority when it approved the hand-counting rule, which is against state law.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democrat Party of Georgia, and other lawyers said in a joint statement, “If the Hand Count Rule goes into effect, the election will not be orderly—the large counties will have to wait a long time to report vote counts, election officials will have a hard time putting new procedures into place at the last minute, poll employees will not be trained on the new rules because it was put into place too late, and the safety and security of the election ballots will be at risk.”
They said that “possible delays” from the hand-counting would “give bad-faith players chances to say that fraud has altered election results—a result that would hurt public confidence in the election of DNC candidates in particular.”
This week also featured the trial for a different election-related case. Filed by Democrats who are questioning two rules that were passed by the state election board in August. Democrats are against the rules that say county election officials can “examine all election-related paperwork made during the conduct of polls prior to certification of results” and must do a “reasonable inquiry” into the results before confirming them.
