Election night hand count of ballots halted by Georgia judge

ATLANTA — A judge stopped a planned hand count of ballots on election night in Georgia, ruling Tuesday that it would create “administrative chaos” if poll workers were required to handle millions of ballots without being trained.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney put the State Election Board’s hand-count requirement on hold primarily because it was approved so close to Election Day. The manual review would have counted the number of ballots but not votes.

Without the hand count, voters can expect results to come in faster on election night than if they had to wait for poll workers to manually count ballots.

“The public interest is not disserved by pressing pause here. This election season is fraught; memories of Jan. 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” McBurney wrote in his decision. “Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public.”

The decision followed a six-hour hearing in a lawsuit filed by Cobb County’s election board, which argued that the Republican-controlled State Election Board’s hand-count requirement was unreasonable.

McBurney wrote that a human confirmation of machine counts could help ensure orderly elections, but he found that a last-minute hand count wouldn’t boost public confidence.

“Clearly the SEB believes that the hand count rule is smart election policy — and it may be right. But the timing of its passage make implementation now quite wrong,” McBurney wrote.

The hand-count rule called for three poll workers in each precinct to empty ballot boxes and sort ballots into stacks of 50 after polls close. The hand count would be compared with the number of scanned ballots and voter check-ins, and then election officials would determine the reason for any discrepancies.

An attorney for the State Election Board argued that any delay would have been minimal — an average of 15 to 22 minutes in Cobb County precincts, based on turnout in prior elections. Cobb officials estimated it would take an hour to count 2,000 ballots in a larger precinct.

“The time it would take to do this is completely overblown,” said Robert Thomas, who represented the board. “There’s no conflict with the certification, and there’s no conflict with the election night unofficial results reporting.”

But McBurney ruled against introducing a new election process without time to train roughly 7,500 poll workers across the state — three for every precinct.

The State Election Board approved the hand-count requirement on Sept. 20, and it was scheduled to take effect Oct. 22, two weeks before Election Day and one week after early voting began.

McBurney didn’t rule on five other rules contested in court Tuesday, including requirements for poll watching in tabulation areas, reconciliation of ballot counts, and public posting of the number of early and absentee voters.

Those rules are also being challenged in other lawsuits, including cases brought by both Republicans and Democrats. Two of those lawsuits are scheduled to be considered by a Fulton County Superior Court judge Wednesday.

McBurney isn’t the final say on the hand-count rule. His ruling will likely be appealed during the three weeks before Election Day on Nov. 5.

_____