Why Georgia’s new election rules have local officials worried

With Election Day looming, three dozen poll workers are gathered in a conference room at the Rockdale County Board of Elections for a crash course in voting rules and procedures. But before they can get to the normal training for running elections in this majority Black, middle-class community in suburban Atlanta, there’s a new hurdle to sort out.

“How many of you have already heard on the news talking about the hand count of ballots?” asks Rockdale County Supervisor of Elections Cynthia Willingham. 

Every hand shoots up. 

“That’s another task for us to do on Election Day. And we’ve heard where people say it’s going to delay the count and so forth,” she says. “So I have come up with a procedure that I hope will work well, where it still will get you all out of the precinct on time.”

Ms. Willingham, who has been supervising elections in the state for 35 years, had spent the previous day racing to create a mock-up tally form so her workers could learn how to comply with a last-minute rule imposed by the Georgia State Election Board requiring that all ballots cast on Election Day be counted by hand. That means after typically working a 14-hour shift running the polls, these workers, most of whom are senior citizens, will begin the laborious task of individually tallying ballots to try to make sure the total matches the machine count for their precinct. Experts say the process could introduce human error and significantly delay the reporting of results.

It’s one of a number of highly controversial changes recently implemented by the Georgia State Election Board after hard-right activists gained a voting majority in May. Other new rules give local election officials wide leeway to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into any perceived problems with the voting process, and potentially to toss out votes. Georgia’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state have both warned that the new rules may violate state law. Voting rights groups and Democrats have brought lawsuits to try to block their implementation, several of which are being heard in court this week.

The maneuvering in Georgia is part of a broader fight that’s playing out in key swing states from North Carolina to Wisconsin to Arizona and could foreshadow an even messier post-election legal brawl – especially if the election results are as close as polls suggest. Former President Donald Trump continues to insist the 2020 election was stolen from him, and he has repeatedly claimed, with no evidence, that Democrats are gearing up to do it again. Republicans have been heavily investing in “election integrity” efforts across the country that they say are aimed at preventing voter fraud. Democrats say those efforts are really aimed at disenfranchising left-leaning voters, sowing uncertainty, and laying the groundwork to try to overturn election results if things don’t go Mr. Trump’s way in November.

Georgia, a crucial battleground state that could determine who wins the 2024 presidential election, is the epicenter of this fight. Democrats, along with some longtime Republican officials who refused to help Mr. Trump overturn his 2020 loss in the state, say the new rules imposed by the election board threaten to throw the whole election process into chaos. Even if judges ultimately toss out the new rules, the controversy could give Mr. Trump and his allies grist to claim the system was rigged against him.

“Everything that they’re doing is destroying voter confidence,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official and a Republican, told the Monitor in an interview last week. “It’s just a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.”

The view from one Georgia county

The eleventh-hour changes have brought added stress to local election officials, and could pose a particular hurdle in the parts of Georgia upended by the recent winds and floods of Hurricane Helene.

Ms. Willingham is facing it all with a cheery can-do attitude, insisting that she, her six staff members, and the 175 poll workers will be able to learn every new procedure before early voting begins in the state on Oct. 15. 

Still, she worries that a new rule giving partisan election monitors the right to access areas previously restricted to poll workers and officials could expose voters’ personal data and information. And she expresses frustration with how the election board’s majority had dismissed election workers’ concerns on a number of new rules.

“I just wish that the State Election Board would have a little bit more faith in us and what we do,” she says.

A controversial 2021 election reform law passed by Republicans included a provision allowing Georgia citizens to challenge any voter registrations they believe may be invalid. GOP activists have seized on it to challenge tens of thousands in the state, forcing understaffed county offices to spend hours slogging through paperwork to see which if any have merit. It’s overwhelmed some offices, especially in Democratic parts of the state where the activists have trained their fire. Another provision hanging over them: If the State Election Board determines county officials are failing to do their jobs properly, the board can take over running that county’s elections.

Election workers face threats

Election officials here, as in many parts of the country, have faced death threats and swatting attempts.

Recently, Ms. Willingham was grocery shopping while wearing her “Ask me how to register to vote” shirt when a man came over and confronted her. 

He said “something to me like ‘you’re trying to add more dead people to the voting rolls,’” she says. Remembering that her state-provided de-escalation training had taught her not to engage with hostile people, she extricated herself from the conversation. Since then, she’s stopped wearing the T-shirt in public. 

After the incident, “I told my staff, if you’re going out, we can’t walk around in these shirts like we used to,” she says. She plans to have 10 police officers stationed at her office throughout the election. “We can’t live by fear, but you can plan for the unexpected.” 

That de-escalation training was part of a broader effort by Mr. Raffensperger’s office to deal with the threats and intimidation that have rained down on nonpartisan election workers since the 2020 election. Two Fulton County workers were forced to flee their homes after Trump allies including Rudy Giuliani falsely accused them of working to rig the election (they later sued Mr. Giualini for defamation and won a $148 million judgment). Georgia’s new safeguards include an emergency texting line, panic buttons that immediately dial 911, and Narcan, a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses, after someone mailed fentanyl to election officials in Georgia and other states late last year. 

Other local election officials are being cautious as well. In Bartow County, a heavily Republican community outside Atlanta, Elections Supervisor Joseph Kirk asks this reporter not to mention where in Georgia he grew up – he doesn’t want his family on anyone’s radar. He’s worked in elections for more than two decades, and says the concern about personal safety is “a whole new thing.” 

As the incoming president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election officials, the nonpartisan group representing local election officials statewide, Mr. Kirk is careful in how he talks about the State Election Board. But he’s clear about his frustration with this year’s last-minute rule changes.

“The rules have been characterized as just common-sense stuff that nobody could possibly have an issue with. And I disagree,” he says. “Elections aren’t as straightforward as some folks might make them out to be.”

The appointee behind new rules

Most of the changes in Georgia’s election rules have been spearheaded by Janice Johnston, a retired OB-GYN and former Fulton County poll worker and poll watcher who became one of the state’s leading right-wing activists in questioning Georgia’s election system after the 2020 election. She was appointed to the State Election Board in 2022 by the Georgia Republican Party (each party gets one representative). The party’s chairman at the time was David Shafer, who currently faces criminal charges stemming from his role organizing a false slate of electors (and serving as one of the false electors) for Mr. Trump in the then-president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

Eight different Georgia county officials have voted against certifying their county’s election results in the past two elections, according to a study conducted by the left-leaning ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW), though all were outvoted by the majorities in their counties. All were Republicans; all but one represented Democratic-heavy counties in metro Atlanta. Dr. Johnston has corresponded and closely worked with a number of them, according to a report in Rolling Stone, citing emails obtained by the magazine.

After Dr. Johnston joined the board, she unsuccessfully pushed to investigate Mr. Raffensperger and to end no-excuse absentee voting in the state. But then an establishment-leaning Republican retired and was replaced by a hard-line ally in May, giving Dr. Johnston the power to push through a bevy of new rules.

Dr. Johnston didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. At a late September hearing, where the board passed the new hand-counting rule, she listed other rules she said had been put into place close to an election.

“The hue and cry about how early or how late it is to be adopting these rules, I don’t buy,” she said. “There’s no exception: A good rule is good.”

Former President Trump has taken notice of her efforts. At an August rally in Georgia, he praised Dr. Johnston and her two right-wing allies on the board by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Dr. Johnston, who was at the rally near the front, stood up and waved as Mr. Trump personally thanked her and the crowd cheered.

“Just a simple hand count”

The new rules don’t just threaten to undermine voter trust. They also could land low-level poll workers in the middle of a maelstrom.

Ms. Willingham repeatedly reminds her trainees that they could face public scrutiny and possible subpoenas. She encourages the workers to call her office if anything odd comes up, like a voter walking out with their ballot, and she repeatedly emphasizes double-checking every detail, in case “one of the people that are hand-counting the ballots is called to testify” in court post-election. 

The training for the new hand-count rule – requiring that three workers independently count the ballots in separate stacks of 50 – adds nearly an hour to the overall session, extending it well past its scheduled three-and-a-half hours.

“They said ‘this is just a simple hand count,’” Ms. Willingham says about halfway through the exercise, as some in the room laugh wearily. “If they walked through this with us, they would understand. ... But we’re going to roll with it.”

While the workers in the room seem comfortable that they’ll be able to get things right, they aren’t confident that will be true elsewhere in their state – a sign of how much the last-minute scramble could undercut trust in the system. 

“My concern is as a citizen in the state of Georgia,” says one poll worker after raising her hand toward the end. “You’re saying this is what you’re doing, because Rockdale is going to do it right. But what about the other 158 counties?” 

The rest of the room murmurs in assent.