Zach Manifold is an elections supervisor in suburban Atlanta's Gwinnett County, where training for 2,000 poll workers begins this week. Matthew Pearson/WABE Hide caption
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Matthew Pearson/WABE
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia's state elections board is preparing to vote Friday on nearly a dozen rule changes that could take effect before the upcoming election. This involves local officials who train election workers and process postal vote applications.
The once opaque state panel is already under scrutiny for pushing two rule changes in August that could affect the certification of election results. The moves by the board's Republican majority were praised by former President Donald Trump and opposed by Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other election officials.
“You can have 10 election officials stand up there and say, 'That's bad, that's bad, that's bad.' And then the board says, “I'm making a motion that we agree to this rule,” said Travis Doss, the elections director in Richmond County.
Among the changes set to be voted on Friday is a new requirement that the manager of a polling place and two witnesses hand-count the ballots in each ballot box to verify that the count matches the number recorded by the voting machines Ballot matches.
Other proposals include introducing manual counting of mail-in ballots, requiring public disclosure of all registered voters in the upcoming election and expanding access for poll watchers.
The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which represents 500 members statewide, has called on the state board to pause implementing new rules until after the election. In a letter, the association wrote that its members are “deeply concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already underway.”
That's something Georgia's foreign minister reiterated in a Monday letter to the head of the State Council, with Charlene McGowan, the minister's general counsel, citing “the absurdity of the timing of the board's actions.”
Election officials fear poll workers will need to be retrained
In Gwinnett County, a suburb of Atlanta, training for 2,000 of the county's poll workers begins this week. Elections director Zach Manifold says it's complicated when the rules change, “especially when we have to retrain people.”
When Manifold met with his deputies in July, they agreed that all three elections so far this year had gone smoothly.
“We have had three elections. We're feeling pretty good. “Let’s not change anything in the next three months,” he recalled at the time. “I wish everyone had that view.”
Georgia's five-member state election board will be considered in August. Matthew Pearson/WABE Hide caption
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Matthew Pearson/WABE
Manifold says election officials are already grappling with new election laws passed after the 2020 election, such as an overhaul in 2021 that imposed stricter time frames for returning mail-in ballots and a law passed this year that amended rules for tinkering with the challenges of the mass electorate.
With these laws, Manifold said, election officials would have had more time to prepare.
Manifold says the county board is working to develop a policy for adapting to the new certification rules and provide guidance on what documents board members can review before certification.
“You can’t just tell me on Saturday that you want to see a document from all 156 counties in Gwinnett,” Manifold said. “I can’t just pull this out and bring it to you the next day.”
Certification rules provoke quick backlash
The new rules appear to allow local election board members to vote against certifying an election if they report discrepancies being uncovered or if they cannot review all of the requested ballot materials.
The trio of Republican state board members who endorsed the new rules say it's unfair to require local boards to agree to results they may have questions about.
Georgia's secretary of state, along with most election law experts, says Georgia law does not give local election board members this discretion. But since 2020, a growing number of local Republican board members have tested their authority in several swing states.
Each time, courts or state officials have stepped in to force certification, but election officials and legal experts worry that even failed attempts to halt the process could lead to delays or fuel misinformation about the integrity of the results.
Some of the new rules were drafted with input from activists and groups that loudly and baselessly challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election, and were approved by Republican board members who also harbored or promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
But Republican board member Janelle King told reporters in August that she “doesn't make decisions based on which side of the aisle wants me to do something.” I look at the facts. I'm looking at the evidence. I’ll look at what’s in front of me and see if this is a good rule – whether it continues to secure our elections or not.”
Two lawsuits have been filed against the certification rules. The Georgia Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee, with support from the Harris campaign, filed one of the lawsuits. The plaintiffs in another lawsuit include a Republican election board member in Chatham County.
A trial is scheduled for October 1.
Election officials are upset about the new rules and growing challenges
For the first time, the Association of Election Officials hired a lobbyist to help shape the rapidly changing election rules and laws. But to Richmond County's Doss, who leads the group, it increasingly looks like the people drafting those guidelines are more inclined to listen to activists who raise doubts about election integrity than to experts who have since hold elections for years.
Doss says this is one of the reasons many veteran officials have left the field, in addition to the threats, harassment and vitriol directed at them and the growing demands to ensure election security.
“I still have about four years until I can retire,” says Doss. “Believe me, I have a countdown clock on my phone.”
In metro Atlanta's Cobb County, election officials have increased training and coordination with local law enforcement. At a Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration meeting in August, an election official told board members that after an argument with a voter, she realized he had been carrying a firearm at the polling place, which was illegal.
“I have seen an increase in voters expressing both concern and displeasure about issues they supposedly expected but did not actually experience,” elections director Susan Radulovacki told the board. “However, their anger is very real. It’s not uncommon for them to become loud and belligerent, and then it becomes my job to defuse the situation before it explodes.”
“To be completely transparent, this idea of poll worker safety keeps me up at night,” Cobb County elections director Tate Fall said at the meeting. “I have experienced poll workers who don’t want to work. I have people in the office who have worked for us for decades and are now retiring.”
In Gwinnett County, Manifold says he's aware of the various sensitive scenarios that could arise, but he's confident his team is prepared. “If you worry and worry and worry, it will just eat you alive,” he says.
There's another reason he says people should feel safe.
“The people who work at your polling place are your neighbors, your teachers, your firefighters,” Manifold said. “And that makes me feel really good. At the end of the day, it’s really driven by your community.”
However, in recent cycles, this has not always been enough to keep the temperature down when some voters' distrust of elections is high.