‘Injecting Chaos’: CNN Reporter Breaks Down Trump-Backed Changes to Georgia Election Rules

CNN’s Kasie Hunt spoke to political correspondent Sara Murray on Friday about the controversial changes being made to Georgia election laws by the GOP-dominated election board in the state.

“My understanding is one of these measures that they are looking at just actually went through. Can you explain?” Hunt began.

“Yes. So they are considering a dozen rules that could go into effect around November. And election officials in the state are basically begging them to stop making changes when we’re just weeks out of early voting,” Murray began, adding:

So here’s just a couple of them and I’ll explain the one that passed as we get to it. But one of them is this provision that would require marking absentee ballots to distinguish them between provisional and emergency ballots, which seems like not a big deal, except that all of the ballots in Georgia have already been printed and they’re about to go out.

Another one of these rules requires a hand count of the number of ballots on Election Day at these polling places to make sure the number of ballots cast matches with the tally from the machines. And this is the rule that just passed and was a big concern for election officials.

And another rule that at least for now, sounds like it is tabled is a daily, again, hand count of the number of ballots on each day of early voting to make sure that you can match that day the number of votes cast with the number recorded by the machines. And election officials are saying you guys do not understand that you need to train people on this. You need to make provisions to move these things forward. You’re essentially injecting chaos into this process.

Hunt followed up, “Yeah. And certainly can you give us a sense of what this is going to look like on Election Day if all of this goes through?”

“Yeah, I mean, we’ll see if it goes through. I would be surprised if we’re not seeing some lawsuits around it. But I think the biggest concern has been around this kind of hand-counting rule that we saw just go through for Election Day, because Georgia has taken some steps to try to speed up its reporting of results on election night. And I was just talking yesterday to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, about what a change like this could mean. Here’s what he said,” Murray said before playing a recorded clip of her speaking to Raffensperger:

When you start breaking open the ballot boxes after you close the precinct. You won’t be getting those Election Day votes until maybe 1:00, 2:00, 4:00 in the morning. And we just don’t believe that’s healthy for, you know, the republic and we don’t think it’s healthy for the people of Georgia.

“There’s a lot of frustration. I mean, they made changes to try to make it clearer to people earlier in the state of Georgia, ‘Who is ahead? Who is winning the election?’ And now they’re looking at what the state election board is doing, saying you’re injecting chaos into this. You’re creating an atmosphere for conspiracy, for misinformation. Secretary of state’s office, the attorney general, both Republicans have warned the state election board, you’re doing things that we think are potentially illegal and the board is just plowing ahead,” Murray said.

“Is it a Republican board? How are the politics of this?” Hunt asked.

“This is a five-member board? And now there’s this three-member Republican majority that has just kind of been barreling ahead with these changes. These are people that in some cases are very openly backing Trump. Donald Trump has openly backed them and sort of cheered along these changes. And again, a lot of these changes that we’ve seen put forward are things that are being put forward by far-right activists in the states, by election deniers and the Republicans, you know, again, with this three-member majority have really embraced it, and run with it,” Murray concluded.

Watch the clip above via CNN.