Maroc - RAWSTORY.COM - Raw Story - 19/Aug 15:06

Trump-backed Georgia Election Board faces resistance to changes at heated meeting: report

The Georgia Election Board faced huge resistance during its Monday morning meeting from legal experts, county election officials, and from some local citizens.The board has come under scrutiny after it was revealed that three of the members of the five-person panel are pro-Donald Trump members whom the former president even singled out for commendation during a recent Georgia rally. Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at the Georgia State School of Law, described the meeting as filled with the public commentary against the new rules being passed down from the board.Read Also: A breathtaking scam: Inside Georgia's newest voter suppression tacticMSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, who has been covering the meeting, reports that a Forsyth County elections administrator on Monday told the board that their rules requiring a "hand count of paper ballots by precinct is needless 'busy work.'"What Rubin found interesting is that "many of the commenters are veteran election administrators, whose concerns are practical, not partisan."She described one person who warned that the "chain of custody could be compromised" by using the board's demand to pass ballots around to so many people. Another county election administrator, Rubin reported, argued that a rule the board is considering would set "159 counties up for failure."Self-described centrist Lynne Durham, from Gwinnett County, took issue with the board refusing to define what it means by "reasonable," in reference to a report from Pro Publica over the weekend that revealed board members' goal of empowering county board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities.Durham told the board this process will just cause "chaos" around the election and then warned, "History has its eyes on you."