The Return of the Hand Count
The election is over. The assault on elections law in Georgia continues.
Some Georgia lawmaker axe murdered HB 397 yesterday afternoon while no one was looking and dressed an election crackpot zombie in its clothes.
The gutting and rewriting of bills after Crossover Day is common enough. In this case, a two-page bill allowing municipalities to forego Saturday early voting in local races has become a 27-page thing stuffed the sort of fringe election rulemaking that packed the otherwise somnolent hearing room of the State Election Board last fall.
The new HB 397 would codify into law a rule struck down in court last year, requiring a poll manager and two poll officers to unseal ballot boxes at each precinct on election night and hand count the paper ballots that the machine has tabulated, then reseal them for delivery. All three counts have to match, and they have to match the machine count. Any inconsistency would have to be documented and corrected if possible.
Seems small, right? The problem is that a separate state law requires poll results to be tabulated by midnight. In a large county like Fulton with hundreds of precincts, it is statistically much more likely for one precinct to get gummed up than one with a handful of boxes to count. Hand counts are less reliable than machine counts, especially after a 16-hour workday.
Georgia Attorney General Brian Carr issued an unusual warning to the State Election Board last year after it passed this rule in September, about six weeks before Election Day. In a letter sent to the board, Carr said that the board ran a “substantial risk of intruding upon the General Assembly’s constitutional right to legislate” with its rulemaking, and warned that the rules would probably not survive a court challenge … which they did not.
Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the State Board of Elections by name at a rally last year, clearly suggesting that they were in the bag. Last summer, they began adopting rules offered by right-wing election denialists like Garland Favorito designed to promote chaos in case Georgia didn’t go their way in November.
Well. Trump won Georgia. Their silence is telling.
Some of the potential damage was being mitigated by the board’s chairman John Fervier, and by the Secretary of State’s office. Though the legislature removed Brad Raffensperger from his position on the board after the 2020 election, his office still administered the State Board of Elections. In one case, a board hearing was ruled invalid because no proper notice was given - a function that had to go through Raffensperger’s team.
HB 397 reassigns administrative functions for the State Elections Board to the State Accounting Office. You may laugh aloud. I did.
An earlier version of HB 397 contained provisions to change the way a member of the State Elections Board could be removed. My understanding is that some of the people who made appointments to this board were displeased with what they got, but there were legal and political questions about how to gank them off the board.
The proposal to allow the legislature to un-appoint someone has been excised from the bill’s new language. Instead, HB 397 sets a hard statutory time limit on the SEB’s rulemaking, barring new rules within 60 days of an election.
But it also revives the so-called “Voter Integrity Act” of House Bill 215, which did not survive Crossover Day. HB 215 would bar Georgia from remaining in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, an interstate election registration database.
ERIC is - or should be - the answer to rightwing charges of interstate voter fraud. The elections offices of 24 states compare notes when someone moves from one state to another. If a voter registers in a new state, ERIC notifies the previous state so they can knock that voter off the old voter roll.
Trump and other right-wingers have attacked ERIC, largely because of how its early-warning system showing someone has moved but hasn’t registered encourages new voter registration. The fringe prefers Eagle AI, a private organization created by Trump partisans.
Last year, Fulton County elections workers accepted about 100 absentee ballots delivered by hand on the weekend before the election in November. That set off a lawsuit by Republicans arguing that it violated state law on drop box availability and early voting. A superior court judge disagreed. HB 397 closes that loophole, explicitly prohibiting elections offices from taking walk-in absentee ballots on the weekend before an election.
The rewritten HB 397 requires driver’s services staff to ask anyone asking for a voter registration form if they are a citizen, and to remind applicants that it’s a felony for noncitizens to apply to vote. It would also make the application to register to vote in one county authorization to cancel a voter’s registration in a previous county … possibly before the new registration is processed.
There are some other small changes to how independent candidates for president get on the ballot, requiring video surveillance for drop boxes, giving poll watchers more access to watch tabulation and qualification dates for special elections. But tellingly, much of this stuff never got a hearing in a House committee. It’s being slid under the door where other lawmakers — and the public — never got a chance to argue about it.
I only learned about it because I was at the capitol to do an interview and someone who understood that I watch elections law handed me a copy in the hallway. As of this instant, it’s not up on the legislative website yet.
They filmed Zombieland in Georgia for a reason. Dead things walk our halls.
George I just got an email from a neighbor who says that the Senate has also tacked on a provision that there can only be one early voting location per County. That isn't going to cut it for the Metro area!!
Combined with the late-in-the-day Trump EO re: elections, one would think our voting rights are under attack, just as some of us have been warning for years. Project 2025, anyone?