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Georgia’s state election board voted in favor of requiring counties to hand-count ballots on Election Day, a move that could do much to restore confidence in election integrity after the controversial 2020 election.

On Friday, the Georgia State Election Board voted 3-2 to put in place the rule that requires poll workers to count the ballots manually at the precinct level at the end of the night, a big change less than two months before the most pivotal election in the nation’s history.

The ruling is a big win for former President Donald J. Trump who praised the three board members at a rally in Atlanta last month. But other Republicans have opposed the change, which will quickly be dragged into the courts by Democrats.

After the vote, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the state’s attorney general said “that these rules would not withstand a legal challenge.”

“As Georgia’s Secretary of State, I believe elections should be free and fair – and with fast results. And that is why I work everyday to ensure every legal vote counts— and hold both sides accountable to you, the voter,” Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, said in a Thursday post to X.

“We consider these major changes to the election process,” he told NBC News on Thursday. “I guess we have several concerns. Number one is the actual counting of the number of ballots that you have at the precinct. That’s going to take time. Everything that we’ve done for the last six years has to speed up the process to give the voters the results quicker, and all of a sudden now they’re adding an element that it’s actually going to take longer.”

“I want to make on the record that we’ll be going against the advice of our legal counsel by voting in the affirmative,” said Georgia Election Board chairman John Fervier – an appointee of Gov. Brian Kemp – before the rule passed. The board’s lone Democrat, Sara Tindall Ghazal, also opposed the change.

“If the legislature had wanted this, they would have put it in statute,” Fervier said, according to The Washington Post. “This board is not here to make law. We’re here to interpret law, and I don’t see anywhere in statute where we’re interpreting the hand-counting of ballots after they come out of the machine.”

One board member who voted in favor of the hand-counting rule dismissed Raffensperger’s concerns.

“I do not have those concerns at all,” Janelle King told NBC News.

“I think it’s actually going to be the reverse,” she added, because “we won’t have a situation where we have any candidates saying that they think the count is off or they want an audit because something went wrong. We would have caught it at an early stage.”

Democrats fiercely opposed any changes to the existing system in a state that they unexpectedly carried in 2020, flipping the Peach State blue in what would be a win for now-lame duck President Joe Biden that Trump has maintained was not on the up and up.

Former Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington hailed the decision as “great news” in a post to X.

Critics howled that the rule would delay the election results, not previously a concern of theirs when it comes to other key battleground states such as Pennsylvania where it has already been announced that the results likely wouldn’t be determined on election night, and just last week, The New York Times said that the results of the election wouldn’t be known for days, suggesting that it was the new normal.

“It makes me question whether members of this board are operating in good faith,” said Democrat state legislature member Saira Draper, an election lawyer from Dekalb County.

“Putting 11, maybe 12 new rules into play days before Election Day is a grift. We are setting up our counties to fail. Why do we know they are going to fail? Because they are telling you that,” she said, according to the Washington Post.

Since Kamala Harris was installed after a Nancy Pelosi-orchestrated coup to replace Biden, the dynamic has shifted with the media portraying the contest between her and Trump as a razor-thin election, and every vote is going to be of great importance in the battleground states.

Chris Donaldson
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