By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Georgia's Republican-controlled state election board approved a new rule on Monday that voting rights advocates say could permit local election officials to delay certification of November's presidential election results, potentially throwing the outcome of the battleground state's vote into uncertainty.
The five-member board, which includes three conservative members championed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, voted 3-2 to empower county election board members to investigate any discrepancies, even minor ones, between the number of cast ballots and the number of voters in each precinct before certification.
Such mismatches are not uncommon and are not typically evidence of fraud, according to voting rights advocates, who say the rule could permit individual board members to intentionally delay approval of the results.
Trump, who praised the majority's three members by name during a Georgia campaign rally earlier this month, has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged by fraud.
His infamous January 2021 phone call in which he asked the state's top election official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to "find" enough votes to sway the outcome helped lead to Trump's pending indictment on state charges.
Voter fraud in the U.S. is vanishingly rare, research shows.
Trump faces Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, in the Nov. 5 election. Polls show a close race, with Georgia among seven states likely to determine the outcome.
Monday's action came less than two weeks after the board's majority approved a separate rule that county election boards conduct a "reasonable inquiry" into any irregularities before certifying the results. The rule did not define "reasonable" or set a particular deadline for completing the inquiry.
Voting rights groups say the new rules could allow election deniers to refuse to certify any election that their preferred candidate lost.
"These rules are potentially granting individual county board members the power to obstruct, delay or otherwise interfere with the certification process," said Nikhel Sus, an attorney with the nonprofit watchdog Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington.
Even if certification proceeds, he said, any doubt cast on the results could be used as a pretext to argue that Congress should ignore them, as some Trump allies argued in 2020.
Republican supporters said it would simply ensure that election results were accurate.
"This is a matter of good government, not politics," Hans von Spovosky, an election law scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said during the election board's hearing. "Those who say this will disenfranchise voters – that's just not true."
Before Trump's loss in 2020, certification was essentially a rubber stamp. But at least 19 election board members across nine counties in Georgia have objected to certifying election results since 2020, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
Local election officials in several other states, including such battlegrounds as Arizona and Michigan, have also voted against certifying results.
The board also advanced on Monday a rule that would require a hand count of ballots in every precinct after the polls close. The board will consider that proposal in September.
Raffensperger issued a statement last week opposing the actions by the board's "unelected bureaucrats," warning that the "11th-hour" changes would undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; editing by Paul Thomasch and Deepa Babington)
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