A hearing was held Tuesday in a key Georgia county’s lawsuit against the State Elections Board (SEB), roughly three weeks until voters head to the polls on Nov. 5.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney is overseeing the case filed by the Cobb County Board of Elections earlier this month. The bipartisan board is taking issue with a set of new rules imposed by the SEB, including a measure to require county election workers to hand count ballots after polls close to ensure accurate machine tabulation.
The rule has also sparked a lawsuit filed by Georgia Democratic officials, which is set for a hearing on Wednesday.
Cobb County is a majority suburban area anchored by the city of Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta.
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During the Tuesday hearing, attorneys for the SEB argued that there were no limitations on when election rules can be passed and pointed out that the specific hand-counting rule applies only to the ballots themselves, not tallying individual votes cast on the ballots.
“All we are doing is saying, you need to [have] receipts of votes cast, mirror the number that the machine says were cast,” the lawyer said.
But McBurney noted that it was “late in the game” for the SEB to change election rules but also conceded that, in a vacuum, wanting to ensure that the number of ballots cast matched the machine-count was a “laudable goal.”
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“Why wouldn’t we just pause, especially on the hand-count rule, given what looks like a fairly robust record of chaos that it is sowing?” the judge asked the defendants’ lawyer.
“I’m asking you from a practical perspective, if the goal is orderly, reliable elections, why the prudent — in terms…
