September 20, 2024
ATLANTA — All Voting is Local Action Georgia State Director Kristin Nabers issued the following statement in response to the Georgia State Election Board passing a rule Friday that would mandate hand counts on Election Day:
“By mandating hand counts that can magnify discrepancies and potentially delay results, the Georgia State Election Board has taken another dangerous step to create doubt in our election process where there should be none. Counting thousands of ballots by hand will be an incredibly tedious, expensive, and possibly error-prone process. Any human errors can be exploited by election deniers to sow distrust and decrease confidence in our elections and in the hard-working election officials that run them. Many election workers have spoken recently about the threats they are facing from the conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that our elections are fair, and these rules just add fuel to that fire.
“Implementing these drastic changes less than a month before the start of early voting means counties may have to restart their training of poll workers. These unnecessary hand counts are setting the county election offices up for failure. Today, we witnessed the board allow election deniers to complicate elections in the Peach State even further with their baseless conspiracy theories.”