MAGA-Allied Georgia Election Board Votes to Hand-Count Ballots: Move Could Throw National Election

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With just weeks to go before the November 5 presidential vote, the pro-Trump majority on Georgia's State Election Board voted 3-2 on Friday to require ballots to be hand-counted, potentially delaying results and sowing chaos on election night in the swing state. Voting rights advocates say hand-counting ballots is more time-consuming and could also introduce errors compared to the use of standard voting machines. "This adds, at really the 11th hour, another layer of confusion," says election law attorney Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia State Election Board. "The counties are being set up for failure, but to me one of the most troubling aspects of this whole thing is we were told by our attorneys … that we don't have the legal authorities to even do this." Donald Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, and he continues to falsely claim the election was marred by fraud. We also speak with Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman, who says the Georgia rules change is part of a wider Republican campaign to "rig the voting rules to benefit their side in a really unprecedented way." Jones also discusses how Trump allies in Nebraska are ramping up efforts to change the state's Electoral College process to grant all votes to the statewide winner.

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