By Luc Cohen, Jack Queen
(Reuters) -Lawyers for the Democratic Party urged a judge in Georgia on Tuesday to undo changes made by a Republican-controlled board to election rules in the state that they said could undermine trust in the .
The Georgia Election Board in August empowered county election board members to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and voters in each precinct, and examine a trove of election-related documents before certifying their results. Its 3-2 vote was powered by three allies of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who lost to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia in the 2020 election and made false claims of widespread voting fraud.
A non-jury trial in a lawsuit challenging the rules got underway on Tuesday before Judge Robert McBurney in Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta. Democrats are urging McBurney either to nullify the rules or issue orders clarifying that the measures cannot interfere with the certification of election results by the Nov. 12 deadline.
Georgia is one of seven closely contested states that are expected to determine the outcome of the presidential race between Democrat Kamala Harris and Trump.
Democrats argued in a filing that the new rules would "invite chaos" by giving county-level officials license to hunt for alleged fraud and potentially delay certification. They said certification of election results is mandatory under state law, and that other avenues exist to contest disputed results.
Kurt Kastorf, a lawyer for voters who filed the lawsuit alongside the Democratic National Committee, said the new rules risked derailing the certification of election results.
"The uncertainty that the challenged rules inject in the certification process create a risk that the county board of elections might not certify their votes, might not certify at all, or might not certify in time," Kastorf told the judge.
Lawyers for the election board said the new rules do not permit election administrators to delay certification, dismissing as speculative the Democratic concerns that investigations by the panel may cause delays.
Elizabeth Young of the Georgia Attorney General's Office, representing the board during the trial, said election officials are still required to certify results by Nov. 12 under the new rules.
But McBurney noted that he lives in a county where an official refused to certify the results of the 2020 election.
"So I'm just wondering when we need to set aside that assumption," McBurney said.
"All that tells you is that if somebody's going to do that, they're going to do that with or without this rule," Young replied.
The Republican National Committee intervened in the case on the board's behalf. Baxter (NYSE:BAX) Drennon, a lawyer for the committee, said the court should defer to the board's expertise and not interfere with its rulemaking so close to an election.
"We're not changing the law. We're reinforcing or reemphasizing the law that was in place beforehand," attorney Baxter Drennon said.
The trial does not involve another contentious policy move by the board. Democrats on Monday sued in a bid to block the board's Sept. 20 decision to require a hand count of ballots.
Republican Brad Raffensperger, who as secretary of state is Georgia's top election official, has said that the board's "11th-hour" changes would undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.
The board's majority has said the various new rules are intended to make the election more secure and transparent. Trump, seeking a return to the presidency, has praised his three allies on the board as "pit bulls."