A unanimous Georgia Election Board voted Tuesday to redo a heated meeting where three Republicans sought new voting rules amid “chaos and lawfare” over whether the meeting was legal.
The State Election Board decided to reconsider the proposed rules, which would allow more poll watcher access to ballot counting and require counties to post daily ballot tallies on their websites during early voting. The board will discuss the rules again Aug. 6.
The board’s move to revisit its July 18 votes comes after the left-leaning open government group American Oversight filed a lawsuit alleging the meeting violated the Georgia Open Meetings Act because it was called with just over 24 hours’ notice and wasn’t livestreamed for the public.
“There was a weirdly overdramatic and excessive alarm raised — a seemingly coordinated misinformation campaign, followed by apparent media attacks and outrageous and ridiculous threats,” said board member Janice Johnston, an appointee of the Georgia Republican Party. “In the interest of lowering the temperature, we have agreed to redo the unfinished agenda items.”
American Oversight interim Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said the lawsuit got results by prompting the board to reconsider.
“However, we remain deeply concerned by the board’s decision to promptly revisit these problematic measures — including those coordinated with the state and national GOP — that serve to intimidate election workers and grant partisan advantage to preferred candidates this November,” Chukwu said.
Much of the criticism of the board’s meeting, primarily from Democrats and voting rights groups, focused on the fact that it was held without the board’s lone Democratic member, Sara Tindall Ghazal, or its Republican chairman, John Fervier.
But the other Republican members — Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King — said they wanted to move forward with the board’s business, even if Fervier and Ghazal were unwilling or unable to attend. The rules weren’t considered the previous Tuesday because the full-day meeting ran long.
Nearly 250 people attended Tuesday’s 15-minute meeting, which was held online. Public comment wasn’t permitted.
Neither Fervier nor Ghazal commented on the rules or the legality of the previous meeting.
“It is evident that there is already much attention on the State Election Board this election year and perhaps some efforts by those determined to create chaos and lawfare to hamper and cripple election integrity,” Johnston said.
The board also voted to confirm decisions made at a meeting that included all five of its members July 9, including three other rule proposals.
Those rules would allow county election board members to review extensive documents before they certify elections, require election workers to hand-count the number of ballots after polls close to ensure accuracy, and require counties to publish a report explaining vote-counting discrepancies on their websites. The rule proposals could be finalized by the board as soon as Aug. 19.
The board’s action sets up another heated meeting next week, when it could review as many as 16 new election rule petitions and consider a plan for monitors to oversee Fulton County’s election this fall.
Johnston has pushed for greater scrutiny of Fulton after the board voted to reprimand the county for double-scanning over 3,000 ballots during a recount of the 2020 election.
