By Joseph Ax and James Oliphant
(Reuters) -Georgia's Republican-controlled election board voted on Friday to require a labor-intensive hand count of potentially millions of ballots in November, a move voting rights advocates say could cause delays, introduce errors and lay the groundwork for spurious challenges in the battleground state.
The hand-count rule is the latest rule change passed in recent months by a pro-Trump conservative majority of the board who say they are attempting to make the Nov. 5 election more secure and transparent.
Voting rights groups say the changes could allow rogue county election board members to delay or deny certification of election results, throwing the state's vote into chaos, while the state attorney general's office warned the board was likely exceeding its statutory authority with some of the moves.
Georgia is one of seven states likely to determine the contest between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the 2020 election, Trump lost Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden by fewer than 12,000 votes out of approximately five million votes cast. Trump has maintained, with no evidence, that the result was tainted by fraud.
The hand-count rule, which passed in a 3-2 vote, was denounced by election administrators and poll workers who attended the meeting and opposed by Georgia's Republican-led secretary of state and attorney general's offices.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state's top election official, said ahead of the meeting that the rule would introduce "the opportunity for error, lost or stolen ballots, and fraud."
As the hearing began on Friday, members of the public, including county elections supervisors, poll workers and voting rights advocates, urged the board to vote down the hand-count rule, arguing it would create logistical problems, funding shortfalls and security concerns.
Several also contended that it was too close to the election to be altering procedures.
"We have started. The election has begun," Ethan Compton, the election supervisor for Irwin County, told the board. "This is not the time to change the rules."
GOING AGAINST COUNSEL
But Janelle King, a Republican member of the elections board, said the hand count was needed to ensure accuracy, even if that means results would be delayed.
"What I don’t want to do is set a precedent that we are okay with speed over accuracy," King said.
The board's chair, John Fervier, also a Republican, voted against the rule, saying the "overwhelming number of election officials" who reached out to him were opposed to the change.
"I do think it's too close to the election," Fervier said. "It's too late to train a lot of poll workers."
Fervier warned that passing the measure would be ignoring the advice of the board's counsel. That earned him a reprimand from King, who said he was encouraging lawsuits.
The national and state Democratic parties have already filed suits challenging earlier actions by the board.
A letter on Thursday to the board from Attorney General Chris Carr's office said that "several of the proposed rules, if passed, very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority and in some instances appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.”
Georgia now becomes the only state in the U.S. to implement a hand count as part of the normal process of tabulating machine-recorded results, according to Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning public policy institute.
The hand count rule would require three poll workers in each of the state's more than 6,500 precincts to open the sealed boxes of ballots scanned by machines and conduct a hand count, starting as soon as election night.
A separate rule would have imposed the same requirement for any ballot box that collects more than 1,500 ballots by the end of the day during early voting, which starts on Oct. 15, but it was tabled by a 4-1 vote.
Some states use hand counts when conducting recounts in close elections, or as part of routine post-election audits, said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director for Verified Voting, which supports the responsible use of technology in elections. A handful of tiny jurisdictions use hand counts in place of voting machines.
Georgia already has robust procedures in place to ensure an accurate count, experts said, including comparing the number of ballots scanned, the number of ballots printed and the number of voters who sign on. In addition, the state conducts post-election audits to check for any errors.
Trump faces criminal charges accusing him of pressuring Georgia officials to reverse his 2020 election loss, though he denies wrongdoing.