With just weeks to go before the November 5 presidential vote, the pro-Trump majority on Georgia’s State Election Board voted 3-2 on Friday to require ballots to be hand-counted, potentially delaying results and sowing chaos on election night in the swing state. Voting rights advocates say hand-counting ballots is more time-consuming and could also introduce errors compared to the use of standard voting machines. “This adds, at really the 11th hour, another layer of confusion,” says election law attorney Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia State Election Board. “The counties are being set up for failure, but to me one of the most troubling aspects of this whole thing is we were told by our attorneys … that we don’t have the legal authorities to even do this.” Donald Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, and he continues to falsely claim the election was marred by fraud. We also speak with Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman, who says the Georgia rules change is part of a wider Republican campaign to “rig the voting rules to benefit their side in a really unprecedented way.” Jones also discusses how Trump allies in Nebraska are ramping up efforts to change the state’s Electoral College process to grant all votes to the statewide winner.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
With just about 40 days until the presidential election, Georgia’s State Election Board voted 3 to 2 to approve a controversial new rule that will require counties to hand-count the ballots cast election night, which could delay the reporting of results in the key battleground state, and that means for the nation. The proposal was spearheaded by the board’s pro-Trump majority, will require the hand count in addition to the customary machine count in each of George’s precincts. Trump praised the electoral board members last month as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
For more, we’re joined by two guests. We;re going to start with Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of the Georgia State Election Board who opposed the measure. She’s also an election law attorney.
Welcome to Democracy Now! I know you just have a minute. Can you explain how this vote took place and what it means?
SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Certainly. We received a petition from a member of the public who is a well-known election denier a few months ago that would require the counties to hand-count the ballots. Now, this is not a tabulation. This is simply counting the number of ballots that were scanned on the day of the election. We have another one that would have applied to early voting. That one, fortunately, did not pass. Rather than using the normal rule-making procedures of working together, having a board draft the rules, this was one of dozens of petitions that came from election deniers, and they’re motivated by people who believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Now, mind you, there are multiple cross-checks on the number of ballots that get scanned through. There’s a counter on the tabulator. The tabulator tapes have the number of ballots cast. The number of voters who checked in are already going to be cross-checked with the number of ballots printed and the ballots scanned. But this adds, at really the 11th hour, another layer of confusion, because the counties have already hired all their poll workers, they’ve trained their poll workers, and they will have been working for 14 hours, and now they have to hand-count stacks of ballots that are — it’s not like they’re neatly stacked like a ream of paper. They’re all going to be — they have to pull them out of the scanners, and rather than seal them up with a numbered seal that is a security seal, now they have to stack them up, count them three times — not just once, not twice, three times. If there’s a single discrepancy, they have to start over again.
And one of the arguments that my fellow board members made was, “Well, why are you sacrificing accuracy for speed?” That is a policy choice that the Legislature made three years ago when they passed the laws, that had very strict reporting deadlines, which are now at risk of being violated.
The counties are being set up for failure, but to me the most — one of the most troubling aspects of this whole thing is we were told by our attorneys, the state attorney general, that we don’t have the legal authority to even do this, that this is untethered to statute, and yet my colleagues decided to go ahead and pass a rule that they don’t have the legal authority to pass, according to the Attorney General’s Office. That, to me, is the most troubling part of this.
AMY GOODMAN: I know you’re rushing to get to the Election Board meeting. What do you expect to come out of it? And what’s it like to be the only Democrat on this Election Board?
SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Sometimes it can be pretty lonely. I have to be willing to be the unwelcome voice. It’s not just that I’m the only Democrat. I’m also the only attorney and, apparently, the only one, aside from the chairman, who feels constrained by the rule of law. Today we’re looking at more issues that we don’t have jurisdiction to be looking at. So, it’s not going to be a fun morning for me.
AMY GOODMAN: And can this count delay the national count for who is elected president of the United States?
SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Unfortunately, there is every chance that because the counties will not — some counties will not be able to transport those memory cards with the vote totals back to their headquarters to be uploaded for the rest of the nation to see until this hand count has been completed.
AMY GOODMAN: Sara Tindall Ghazal, I want to thank you for being with us, a member of the Georgia State Election Board, the only election law attorney on that five-person board.
In 2020, Georgia was at the center of Trump’s false claims of election fraud as he attempted to overturn his election loss to Biden. Trump at the time told Georgia’s Raffensperger in a phone call, quote, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger refused, but many warn Trump is now laying the groundwork for another attempt at manipulating and undermining voting results in Georgia this November. Democratic Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock said Trump supporters are, quote, “trying to set up a scenario in which they could refuse to certify an election whose results they don’t like.”
This comes as Trump allies in Nebraska are ramping up efforts to change the state’s Electoral College process to grant all votes to the statewide winner. Nebraska and Maine are the only states that split their electoral votes by congressional district.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday nearly 98,000 people whose citizenship documents hadn’t been confirmed can vote in state and local races.
For all of this, we’re joined by Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent, Mother Jones magazine.
Talk about the significance of Georgia, and then just race through everything else, if you will, Ari.
ARI BERMAN: Well, what Republicans are trying to do, Amy, is to, at the 11th hour, rig the voting rules to benefit their side in a really unprecedented way. In Georgia, they’re laying the groundwork not to certify the election if Kamala Harris wins the state, through a series of rule changes that the Trump-aligned Election Board have made.
In Nebraska, they are trying to, quite literally, rig the Electoral College so that Trump wins or there’s a tie, and the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives, because the fact is that the Electoral College is already biased towards Trump, because it favors small states and whiter, more Republican battleground states. But they want to shift this one district in Omaha that could vote for Harris. They want to shift it back towards Trump, so that either Trump wins or, if Harris wins the blue wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the election could be tied. There could be no majority in the Electoral College. The election would then be thrown to the House, where a majority of state House delegations, not state members overall, would choose the president. And that would be an incredibly undemocratic scenario in which a candidate who lost the popular vote, who did not win the Electoral College, could still be installed as president by House Republicans, who would have the power to do so through gerrymandering and other manipulations of the democratic process.
AMY GOODMAN: And Maine?
ARI BERMAN: It’s too late for Maine to fight back. That is the problem. Maine also is one of two states that splits up its Electoral College votes. But Maine has to pass these kind of changes 90 days before the election, or they need a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature to do it, which they don’t have. So, right now I think the problem is it feels like the Trump side is doing everything they can to manipulate the rules, and Democrats don’t have the same ability to fight back. And Trump’s side may have indeed waited in Nebraska for Maine to be unable to retaliate, in order to put this 11th-hour change to the Electoral College through.
AMY GOODMAN: And Arizona, Ari Berman?
ARI BERMAN: So, what happened in Arizona was the Supreme Court, very late in the day, said that people who don’t show proof of citizenship when they register to vote can only vote in federal races, not state races. There were 100,000 ballots that were at issue in terms of people who the state claimed did not have this proof of citizenship. But the Arizona Supreme Court said that they actually can cast both federal and state ballots. And the interesting thing is, these voters who supposedly lack proof of citizenship, they were disproportionately likely to be Republicans. So, it just goes to show you that when you try to suppress voting rights — and they’re trying to suppress the voting rights of Democrats and voters of color — there can also be collateral damage that hurts Republicans, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, go back to Georgia, where we began, and the overall significance of this for the federal election.
ARI BERMAN: What’s happening in Georgia is incredibly disturbing, because the MAGA-aligned Election Board, really at the 11th hour, is passing not one, not two, but three or more rule changes that could lead Republican county boards not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That could plunge the state into chaos. Trump could then weaponize that disinformation. There’s a lot of unpredictable outcomes there. That could also delay the counting of votes, which could send the election to the House.
So, right now we’re just witnessing all of these really disturbing efforts very late in the game to try to manipulate the democratic process to Republicans’ benefits. And they’re basically using all the tools they have to essentially rerun the 2020 playbook to try to steal the election, but this time they’re running it before the election.
AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, I want to thank you for being with us, voting rights correpondent for Mother Jones magazine. We’ll link to your articles.
COMMENTS