Author: Joseph Axe
(Reuters) – Georgia’s Republican-controlled state board of elections approved a new rule on Monday that voting rights advocates say will allow local election officials to delay certifying the results of November’s presidential election, potentially jeopardizing the battleground state’s outcome.
The five-member board, which includes three conservative members championed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, voted 3-2 to authorize county election board members to investigate any discrepancy, even small, between the ballots cast and the number of voters. in each region before certification.
Such discrepancies are not uncommon and are not typically evidence of fraud, according to voting rights advocates. They say the rule could allow individual board members to deliberately delay approval of the results.
Trump, who praised three members of the majority by name at a campaign rally in Georgia earlier this month, has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged by fraud.
His infamous January 2021 call in which he asked the state’s top election official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to sway the outcome, helped lead to Trump’s pending impeachment on state charges.
Voter fraud is vanishingly rare in the United States, research shows.
Trump will face Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, in the Nov. 5 election. Polls show a tight race, with Georgia likely to decide the outcome among the seven states.
Monday’s action came less than two weeks after a government majority approved a separate rule requiring provincial election commissions to conduct a “reasonable investigation” into possible irregularities before confirming results. The regulation did not define “reasonable” or set a specific deadline for conducting the investigation.
Voting rights groups say the new rules could allow election deniers to refuse to certify an election lost by their favorite candidate.
“These rules give individual members of the county board the authority to block, delay or otherwise interfere with the certification process,” said Nikhel Sus, a staff attorney at Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility, a Washington non-governmental organization.
Even as certification moves forward, he said, any skepticism about the results could be used as an excuse to argue that Congress should ignore them, as some Trump allies argued in 2020.
Republican supporters said it would only ensure that election results are accurate.
“This is a good government issue, not a policy issue,” Hans von Spovosky, an electoral law researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said at the Election Commission hearing. “Those who say this are disenfranchising voters – it’s just not true.”
Before Trump’s defeat in 2020, certification was essentially a rubber stamp. But at least 19 Board of Elections members in nine Georgia counties have opposed certifying election results since 2020, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
Local election officials in several other states, including battleground states like Arizona and Michigan, have also voted against certifying the results.
On Monday, the government also introduced a rule that would require manual counting of ballots at each polling station after the polls close. The government will discuss the proposal in September.
Raffensperger issued a statement last week railing against the government’s “actions by unelected bureaucrats” and warning that “11th-hour” changes would undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Deepa Babington)
