Democrats Sue Georgia State Election Board Over Rule Requiring Counties To Hand Count Number Of Ballots Cast
OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:40 PM – Tuesday, October 1, 2024
On Monday, Democrats filed a lawsuit against Georgia’s State Election Board, claiming that a new regulation requiring counties to manually count the votes cast at polling stations on election day will enable “bad-faith actors to claim that fraud has affected election results.”
The new complaint intensifies a protracted legal dispute between the Democrat Party and Georgia’s elections board on a number of laws approved in recent weeks that opponents claim will cause “chaos” in the state following the election.
The lawsuit, which is being backed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, claims that the board exceeded its jurisdiction when it authorized the hand-counting regulation and that it is in violation of state law.
“If the Hand Count Rule is allowed to go into effect, the general election will not be orderly and uniform—large counties will face significant delays in reporting vote counts, election officials will struggle to implement new procedures at the last minute, poll workers will not have been trained on the new rule because it was adopted too late, and the security of the ballots themselves will be put at risk,” stated lawyers for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democrat Party of Georgia, and others in a joint statement.
“Possible delays” caused by the hand-counting, they claimed, would “introduce opportunities for bad-faith actors to claim that fraud has affected election results—a result that would undermine public confidence in the results and in the election of Democratic candidates specifically.”
In a separate election-related case, Tuesday is the trial date for another case filed by Democrats who are challenging two regulations that were approved by state election board members in August. According to the regulations, which Democrats oppose, county election officials are permitted to “examine all election-related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results” and are required to make a “reasonable inquiry” into results before certifying them.
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