Georgia election deniers helped pass new voting rules. Many worry it’ll lead to chaos in November

Conservative activists in Georgia have worked with prominent election deniers to pass a series of significant changes to the procedures for counting ballots in recent weeks, raising alarm about the potential for confusion and interference in the election certification process in a key swing state this fall.

Since the beginning of August, the five-member state election board has adopted rules that allow local election boards to conduct a "reasonable inquiry" into election results before they are certified, and to allow any local election board member "to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results". The same rule also requires local boards to reconcile any discrepancies between the total number of ballots cast and the number of voters who check in. If it can't reconcile the numbers, the board is authorized to come up with a way to figure out which votes count and which do not.

At its upcoming meeting in September, the board is also expected to approve a measure that would require local officials to hand-count ballots to check the machine tabulations. Experts have warned that hand-counts are unreliable, costly and time-consuming.

Georgia law requires county officials to certify an election no later than 5pm on the Monday following election day (the deadline will be one day later this year because of a state holiday). Legal experts have noted that state law is clear about that deadline and that none of the recent rules change that.

But at the same time, observers are concerned new changes are seeding the ground to give local county commissioners justifications to object to the certification of the vote.

"State law clearly states the certification deadline. They can add on whatever they want, but cannot go against the existing state law that says it has to be certified by a specific date," said Julie Houk, a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. At the same time, she added: "What's going to happen when they have not completed a review of those thousands of records? Are the board members going to say 'we can't certify' even though it requires them to?"

"What's going to happen if certain board members or boards determine that now that we have all the records we've demanded, we can't get through them in time to certify?"

The changes have caused considerable alarm in one of the most competitive battleground states this presidential cycle, which is expected to be extremely close. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 by 11,799 votes, a razor-thin margin.

Georgia's state election board, charged with making election rules consistent with Georgia law, was not really paid attention to until this year. But in recent months it has moved forward with a blitz of changes. Earlier this year, Republicans essentially forced out a member who had rebuffed proposed changes and replaced him with someone who has been more sympathetic to the changes.

That new member, Rick Jeffares, has previously posted in support of Trump's election lies, though he recently told the Guardian he believed the former president lost in Georgia in 2020. He also said that he had proposed himself for a job with the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration.

The new rules enacted by the board have been shaped with input from the Republican party and a network of election denial activists. The precinct reconciliation rule adopted on Monday, for example, was presented by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton county commissioner who has run a private Telegram channel filled with election conspiracies. She said during the meeting on Monday she had worked with a number of people on the proposal, including Heather Honey, a prominent activist in the election denialism movement.

Input on rules has also come from the state Republican party, the New York Times reported. Julie Adams, who is connected to a network of election deniers and has refused to certify two elections this year as a member of the Fulton county election board, has also had input on the rules, ProPublica reported.

Trump has publicly praised three of the Republicans on the board who have constituted the majority to enact the new rules. During a rally earlier this month he called them "pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory".

Three lawyers tied to Trump also spoke out in favor of the new rules on Monday. They included Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation who served on Trump's voter fraud commission, Ken Cuccinelli, who had a top role in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, and Harry MacDougald, who is defending former justice department official Jeffrey Clark in the Georgia criminal case dealing with Trump's efforts to overturn the election.

John Fervier, the Republican chair on the board who voted against the rule, said he was also concerned about refusal to certify elections.

"We've seen boards, or board members recently, that refused to certify because they didn't see X, Y or Z documents. I think this just even opens the door more to that," he said.

During Monday's meeting, those who supported the rule insisted that local county commissioners could refuse to certify an election if they did not believe the tally was accurate.

"One individual board member does not have authority to overrule other board members," Thorne said. "Board members would have the right to disagree if they wanted to disagree. But hopefully by having this process in place, everyone will be confident and go ahead and certify.

MacDougald, one of the lawyers supporting the proposal, suggested that a judge could not force a majority of election board members to certify a result they believed was incorrect. "The board members have the right to vote on certification, that necessarily gives them the right to vote against it," he said.

"Unless a board member has full confidence in the administration of the election, that it was done without error, they should not certify the election," von Spakovsky said at the meeting.

Election officials have expressed concern about the new rule that prevents them from counting any ballots in a precinct if the number of voters checked in doesn't align with the number of ballots cast. These small discrepancies often occur because of human error - a voter might check in and leave with their ballot or a voter concerned about their mail-in vote counting might decide to cast a vote in person. These small discrepancies are almost always smaller than the margin of votes and are explained in a reconciliation report to the secretary of state after the election.

There also could be problems with the portion of the rule that empowers local boards to come up with a way of tabulating the votes if the discrepancy, no matter how small, can't be explained.

"Let's say I'm at a poll that has 500 ballots. And we go through and determined one of those 500 voters should not have cast that ballot for whatever reason," said Joseph Kirk, the election director in Bartow county, Georgia, which is about an hour north-west of Atlanta. "How do we know which ballot to take out of the box? They're anonymous."

Even if the election result is eventually certified, any discovery found during the new investigatory phase could become fodder to continue to challenge the election results. In 2020 and 2022, Trump and allies seized on human errors to falsely argue that they were only the tip of a corrupt system.

The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, an organization that represents election officials across the state, called on the board to stop making changes, warning that continuing to do so would cause confusion.

"Any last-minute changes to the rules risk undermining the public's trust in the electoral process and place undue pressure on the individuals responsible for managing the polls and administering the election," said W Travis Doss, the group's president and the executive director of the board of elections in Richmond county, Georgia. "This could ultimately lead to errors or delays in voting, which is the last thing anyone wants."