US judge blocks Georgia order to count votes by hand

A judge in the US state of Georgia has blocked an order for ballots in November’s presidential election to be counted by hand.

Judge Robert McBurney ruled poll workers would not have received adequate training to handle millions of ballots, adding that the last-minute change would have led to “administrative chaos”.

The hand count mandate was passed by the pro-Trump majority on the Georgia election board last month, and Tuesday’s ruling was welcomed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Early voting began in Georgia on Tuesday, with record numbers casting their votes in the key swing state ahead of Election Day on 5 November.

More than 328,000 people voted in person or by post on the first day of voting, officials said – more than double the previous record of 136,000 in 2020.

Around five million votes for president were cast in Georgia that year, with Democrat Joe Biden winning the state by just under 12,000.

Trump refused to accept the result and he has now been charged on eight counts with unlawfully trying to change the outcome, which he denies.

A phone call recording has him telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”.

The hand-count rule would have required three poll workers in the state’s more than 6,500 precincts to break open sealed boxed of ballots already scanned by machine to count them and check there was a match.

Critics said the rule would have allowed election board members to delay or deny the state’s certification of the election results.

In his ruling, Judge McBurney said the “11th-and-one-half-hour implementation of the hand count rule” would diminish public confidence in the outcome.

Credit: bbc.com

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