The Georgia State Election Board has been accused of voter suppression after introducing new rules before the 2024 presidential election.

The changes were voted in by the three Republican members of the election board, while the board’s two non-Republicans voted against them. The new rules allow local officials more power to dispute election results by adopting a new ballot-counting policy. They state that, if a result is disputed in an electoral area, all votes must be counted by hand to ensure that they match the official number of votes cast.

A year ago, a Georgia grand jury accused Trump and others of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state. The former president has denied all charges against him and repeatedly said that the case is part of a political witch hunt against him because he is the GOP presidential nominee.

The case has been delayed ever since, with no prospect of going to trial, after one of the former president’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, a Trump campaign staffer and former White House aide, alleged in a court filing that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had improperly engaged in a romantic relationship with lawyer Nathan Wade, whom she had picked to lead the prosecution against Trump and 18 others.

The new rules allow local election officials to deny election certification until the dispute is resolved.

Critics say that it is being introduced so that Donald Trump can again contest the Georgia result and begin a process of disruption and delay if he loses the election.
The three Republican board members voted to adopt the new measures, while the other two members, a Democrat and an independent, voted against.

Newsweek sought email comment from the Georgia State Election Board and the Trump campaign on Wednesday.

The proposal was submitted to the board by Salleigh Grubbs, chairperson of the Cobb County Republicans.

“We have to have assurance, as Georgians, that what we see printed on our ballot is exactly accurate, and the only way to do that is by a handwritten affiliation on the precinct level,” Grubbs told the board at Monday’s meeting.

Voting rights organization Fair Fight said the rule changes are being introduced so that Republicans would disrupt the election if Trump loses.

“Trump and his MAGA allies have taken over the Georgia State Election Board to try and give a veneer of legality to their illegal scheme to disrupt the certification of Georgia’s 2024 election results,” Fair Fight CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said in a statement.

“Many of Trump’s key election denier allies and Republican Party operatives are behind these illegal, anti-freedom changes to Georgia election rules, and it’s all with the goal of helping Trump win the Peach State, even if he doesn’t earn a majority of Georgians’ votes.”

The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials (GAVREO) also opposes the new rules.

Legal analyst Joyce Vance also condemned the changes. The former Alabama prosecutor is a liberal commentator and a frequent critic of Trump. “Voter suppression is nothing new in the South. But anti-voting activity is ramping up in Georgia because the state that delivered its 16 electoral votes to Joe Biden in 2020 along with two senators to create the Democratic majority in the Senate is firmly in play in 2024,” she wrote in her legal blog, Civil Discourse, on Tuesday.

“The most significant rules change the three board members—each of whom questioned the results of the 2020 election—have slipped in just ahead of this year’s election is one that allows local election officials to delay or deny certification if they have concerns about the outcome. No standard for judging whether those concerns are valid was established,” she wrote.