Can I See a Show of Hands...

There's been a news story the past week or so that has been mistakenly represented, and I think it needs correcting.

The story being wrongly reported is about the Georgia panel ruling on hand-counting the state's ballots. The correct story still bad, but not as horrific as the misperception --

"Votes" will not be hand-counted. Only the number of ballots, in order to see if the number of ballots match the machine count.

The lone Democrat on the board, Sara Tindall Ghazal, was on MSNBC last week, and I heard her correct the misperception.  So, this isn't a case of third-party hearing.

I also tracked this down from CBS News and confirmed that I didn't hear her wrong.  What they wrote was --

"Under the proposal, the poll manager and two poll officers would unseal ballot boxes, count the ballots, compare them to the machine count and resolve any discrepancies between the two."

To repeat, it is most definitely still a problem, and is open to mishandling and tampering.  And it's just one more effort by MAGOPs to try to manipulate the election and cause doubt to creep into the public's mind.  But it is not the far-worse problem for how the ruling is being reported. And for all the problems that could occur, I have to believe that any hand-counting will be intensely monitored and video-recorded. 

The bigger problem, I think, that this will cause (if the ruling isn't overturned) is that it will delay the reporting of results, which would add to any other confusions being raised.  (Though not as much a delay as hand-counting votes.)

Keep in mind that I am near-100% certain that this ruling by the Georgia election board will be challenged in court by Marc Elias and his Democracy Docket.  I feel that confident because they currently are challenging a previous ruling by the board, and have 56 current court challenges against MAGOPs, and who in 2020 won 64 of their challenges -- losing only what turned out to be a literally-meaningless ruling (since zero votes were changed) about making a specific voting deadline two days earlier.  In fact, the only reason I can see Elias and his group not making a challenge is because the State of Georgia (which has already said the election board can't do what it did) ends up making the court challenge itself.

Keep in mind one other thing, too -- as close as the election is expected to be, it is possible that Kamala Harris could get 270 Electoral votes without Georgia.  (It's far more unlikely that Trump could win without Georgia.)