A Crucial Swing State Just Made It Easier To Question Election Results

LOADING ERROR LOADING As Election Day rapidly approaches, the Republican-controlled election board of Georgia, a crucial swing state, just increased the chances of a disputed outcome. Dexter Wimbish, a Democrat and member of the Spalding County election board, told HuffPost he believed Republicans would use the new rules to raise questions about the effectiveness and security of election machines “in case they don’t get the outcome that they’re looking for.” “I can see a number of election boards failing to certify the election, and throwing it into litigation, as a way to prolong that process” if Trump doesn’t win, Wimbish said. “Georgia is the only state that has adopted rules to make it easier for county officials to subvert elections, and it’s deeply problematic.” - Nikhel Sus, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington David Hancock, a Republican county board of elections member in Gwinnett County, voted against certifying the results of the 2024 presidential primary election in his county due to his objections about custody records for certain batches of ballots and poll worker training. Thorne said during the meeting that the rule was a “collaborative effort” and that “numerous people and numerous groups have had their hands in it.” Experts who spoke to ProPublica noted their particular concern over the rule’s requirement that county boards not count the votes of entire precincts until they’d probed any discrepancies — even, as ProPublica pointed out, innocuous things like people checking into polling places but deciding to leave without voting, or election systems being slow to update corrected provisional ballots. For instance, Georgia law vests power in “election superintendents,” which are defined as the entire county board, not individual members, but the new rule regarding access to election documents refers to individual “board members.” “We’ve struggled with, ‘Do we have to use the open records process here for this individual board member?