The state of Georgia will once again be at the centre of the US presidential election. The electoral commission of this southeastern state, where Donald Trump challenged his defeat in 2020, approved, on Friday, September 20, a new regulation requiring evaluators to manually count the votes for the elections of November 5.
This manual recount, according to the adopted regulations, will be carried out in addition to the one carried out by machines, which could delay the publication of the results in this key State. The objective is, according to the text approved by three votes to two, “Ensure a safe, transparent and accurate count”But it is criticised precisely because of the risk of confusion that this could create.
Given the small difference (12,000 votes) that separated him four years ago from Democrat Joe Biden, Republican Donald Trump, again running for the White House, had requested several recounts. He has not yet admitted defeat.
It was also Republican votes that enabled the adoption of this text by the Georgia electoral commission, which had already introduced several changes in the electoral rules in recent weeks that were considered favourable to Donald Trump.
Risk of human error, critics say
Shortly before the vote, the president of the electoral commission, John Fervier, made it clear that the adoption of the regulation would take place “against the recommendations of his legal counsel” and that “a large number of people responsible for carrying out the vote” who contacted him “object”. Saira Draper, a Democrat elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, denounced an attempt to “sow chaos in the electoral process”with evaluators who will not even have the ” time “ Neither the “funds” to implement this measure.
One argument critics are making in appealing the measure is that after a long day of voting, manual counting can lead to more human error and delay the publication of results.
Donald Trump was impeached last year for illegal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, after which he called a senior local official to ask him to ” find “ the roughly 12,000 ballots in his name that were missing to win the state. Trump, the first Republican to lose Georgia since 1992, has never been able to produce evidence of voter fraud, despite recounts and legal challenges.
