'A warning': Experts fear election changes in Georgia could ‘create chaos’ elsewhere

Political jostling over how Georgia’s election will be run this year – including in the critical vote-counting stage post-Election Day – “may be among the starkest examples” of chaos to come beyond the battleground state and around the nation.

Voting experts and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm that rule changes approved by the all-Republican State Election Board, which included a hand counting rule knocked down by a Georgia judge Tuesday, “is part of a larger, years-in-the-making effort to politicize America’s elections,” according to a report in the 19th.

Elections in the country, the report notes, operate as “a decentralized system that in the modern era has been run by administrators who have mostly worked in a nonpartisan manner.”

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But the goal of what is occurring in Georgia, voting rights advocates say, “is to sow mistrust and create chaos in the critical post-Election Day vote-counting stage,” according to the 19th.

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“Georgia may be among the starkest examples, these experts and groups say, but it’s one that previews potential issues elsewhere this election and in the future,” the article says.

Hannah Fried, co-founder and executive director of the nonpartisan group All Voting is Local told the publication that, “Georgia is a warning to us all, adding: “It is the clearest sign of how dire things can get for voters — just for having safe and fair elections, like the kind we’re supposed to have.”

Distrust in elections has been brewing since the 2020 election when Trump repeatedly insisted – without evidence – that his loss against President Joe Biden was a result of widespread voter fraud. The 19th noted that the election “was the most secure in history.”

It added that some voting rights advocacy groups worry that the certification of election results – “a process once viewed as mostly ceremonial” – could be “weaponized to slow down final vote-counting processes nationwide.” The publication cited efforts by local election officials in Nevada and Michigan to refuse to certify primary election results.

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