A judge in the closely watched US swing state of Georgia blocked a new rule Tuesday that would have required election workers to hand-count ballots, as the state posted record turnout on the first day of early voting.
In his ruling, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said the new rule would upend the electoral process just weeks ahead of the November 5 presidential vote and thus was “too much, too late.”
“Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public,” McBurney said, ruling the change would be temporarily halted.
In September, the Georgia State Election Board, led by a pro-Trump majority, issued a controversial rule requiring that counties manually count their ballots, a move that could have significantly delayed the reporting of results.
Georgia officials from both sides of the political aisle have said the count is not only superfluous — machines already count the ballots — but also a potential tool to sow doubt by slowing the process and creating space for disinformation should discrepancies arise via error-prone human counting.
The change is all the more notable given Republican candidate Donald Trump’s alleged election tampering in the state in 2020, pushing for Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump is facing racketeering charges in the southern state over his alleged efforts to overturn the results.
In a separate decision on Monday, the same judge ruled that local election board members must certify vote results.
McBurney’s ruling came after a Republican appointee to the election board in Fulton County, which includes large parts of Atlanta, refused earlier this year to certify the results of Georgia’s presidential primary.
Julie Adams, in a lawsuit backed by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, had sought a judgment that the certification of election results was “discretionary.”
McBurney rejected Adams’s claim.
“If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” McBurney wrote.
“Election superintendents in Georgia have a mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results.”
The certification case is one of a number of election-related cases that are being heard in Georgia, which is expected to be one of seven key states that will determine the outcome of the November 5 election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Tuesday was the first day of early voting in that contest, and a record number of ballots were cast, according to a Georgia state election official.
“We have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on social media platform X.
He said the previous first day early voting record was set in 2020, when 136,000 votes were cast.