A Georgia judge halted a rule requiring the mandatory hand-counting of ballots on election night.
The rule had been put in place by the Georgia Election Board, which maintains that the process is needed to ensure election integrity. Democrats argued that hand counting would drag out the results and cause uncertainty. On Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that the hand counting requirement was passed too close to Election Day and would create uncertainty and disorder in the electoral process.
“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, obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public.”
McBurney wrote that the state should instead use a machine that requires human confirmation to count the votes on election night.
Lawyers for the GEB argued that estimations of how much time it would take to hand count all the ballots are overblown.
“The time it would take to do this is completely overblown,” Robert Thomas, the lawyer representing the board, argued. “There’s no conflict with the certification, and there’s no conflict with the election night unofficial results reporting.”
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McBurney argued that whatever the merits of the argument, it would be inappropriate to institute a system so suddenly before an election.
“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,” he wrote.
