(CNN)– A Georgia judge suspended a new Georgia State Board of Elections rule that would have forced officials to hand-count the number of ballots cast at each polling station, criticizing state election officials for approving it so close to election day.
Judge Robert McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court wrote in his order Tuesday: “No training was provided (much less developed), no protocols were issued for the handling of write-in ballots, and “no allocations were made in any county’s election budget for the additional staff and other expenses necessary to implement the manual recount rule.”
“The administrative chaos that will occur – not that it can occur – is totally incompatible with the obligations of our electoral boards (and the SEB) to ensure that our elections are fair, legal and orderly.”
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The new hand recount rule – which was scheduled to go into effect on October 22 – would require counties to count by hand the number of ballots cast at a polling station, to ensure that it matches the number of ballots counted by the voting machines. Manual recounts, however, would not count how many votes each candidate received, since that is what machines do.
Democrats applauded the ruling Tuesday night. “From the beginning, this rule was an effort to delay the election results to sow doubt in the outcome, and our democracy is stronger thanks to this decision to block it. “We will continue to fight to ensure that voters can cast their ballot knowing it will count,” the Harris campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Georgia Democratic Party said in a joint statement.
The manual recount rule is the subject of litigation on multiple fronts and a separate hearing on the matter is set for this Wednesday. Passed by the Donald Trump-backed Republican majority on the state elections board, the rule would force polling place officials to match the number of ballots counted by voting machines with a manual count of the number of ballots cast.
The measure has drawn bipartisan criticism, in part because the board moved forward with it so close to Election Day.
Georgia Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, noted that the state has taken several steps to speed up the communication of results in Georgia this year. He said the manual recount rule could delay the communication of results, encourage misinformation and raise chain-of-custody issues for ballots.
The rule, McBurney wrote in his order, “comes too much, too late.”
“This election season is tense; The memories of January 6 have not faded, regardless of one’s opinion on the fame or infamy of that date. “Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process harms the public,” the judge wrote, adding that although the rule appears on paper to be an additional human control of the accuracy of the elections, its approval at the last minute “does not contribute to lowering tension or increase public confidence in these elections.”
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McBurney is overseeing a series of high-profile cases related to the Georgia elections. The judge is examining another rule passed by the board in August that requires local election officials to conduct a “reasonable investigation” of election results before certifying them, a mandate that Democrats say could give election officials in the counties given broad authority to delay or completely reject their certification of results “in pursuit of alleged election irregularities.”
And this Monday, he ruled that local election officials have “a mandatory fixed obligation to certify the election results” in the days after the election – dealing a blow to an effort by conservatives in the critical battleground state to obtain the legal right to reject results based on suspected fraud or abuse.
This article has been updated with more details.
