The Georgia Board of Elections rules that votes for the presidential race be counted by hand

2024-09-20 22:38:19, Kosova & Bota CNA

The Georgia Board of Elections rules that votes for the presidential race be

Georgia's Republican-controlled state election commission voted 3-2 Friday to manually count millions of ballots cast in November. Voting rights activists said the decision could cause delays, produce errors and lay the groundwork for continued challenges to the counting process in the battleground state.

The manual vote count is the latest in a series of changes approved in recent months by a pro-Trump conservative majority on the commission, who say they are trying to make the Nov. 5 election more secure.

But voting rights groups say the changes could allow election board members to delay or challenge the certification of election results, throwing the process into chaos in the state.

Georgia is one of seven states that could determine the fate of the race between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the 2020 election, Mr Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes to his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. Mr. Trump has claimed, but without providing any evidence, that the result was the product of extensive manipulation.

The hand count, which was approved by a 3-2 vote, was denounced by election administrators and election workers who attended the meeting and challenged by the Georgia secretary of state and attorney general's office.

The decision makes Georgia the only state in the US to do so, according to Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state's top election official, had warned before the meeting that the introduction of this rule would open the way to "the possibility of errors, loss, or theft of ballots, as well as manipulations." .

The state attorney general's office also warned this week that if the board made such a decision, it would likely exceed the authority the law gives it.

Mr. Trump faces criminal charges in Georgia over what has been described as pressure on state officials to change the outcome of the 2020 election. But the former president has denied the charges.

He has continued to echo his fact-free stances on the legitimacy of US elections, prompting conservative activists and lawmakers across the country to enact new voting rules in the name of preventing tampering.

The hand-count rule would require three poll workers in each of the state's more than 6,500 precincts to open the sealed ballot boxes scanned by the machines and conduct a hand count, beginning on the first since the end of the voting process./ VOA