ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

An examination of a new election rule in Georgia passed by the state’s Republican-controlled election board suggests that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race.

The rule was backed by national groups allied with former President Donald Trump. It gives county boards the power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from the vote totals they certify. Supporters of the rule, most of whom are Republicans, say it’s necessary to root out fraud. Critics, most of whom are Democrats, say it can be used as a tool to disenfranchise select buckets of voters.

An analysis by ProPublica shows that counties wouldn’t have to toss out many precincts to tip the election if it’s as close as it was in 2020, when Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes. Based on tallies from that year, an advantage of about 8,000 Democratic votes could be at risk in just 12 precincts in three counties under the new rule, the analysis found. There are 159 counties in Georgia.

A judge is expected to decide soon whether the rule will stand.

The three counties — Spalding, Troup and Ware — voted for Trump in 2020. But each has small yet significant concentrations of Democratic votes clustered in specific precincts. All three also have local election boards that have become stacked in recent years with partisans who’ve voiced support for the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election or have cast doubt on the integrity of the election process.

In Spalding, about 40 miles south of Atlanta, a man who is now county election board chair had previously alerted Trump’s attorneys to what police later determined was false evidence of voter fraud. More recently, he has tweeted that President Joe Biden is a “pedophile,” made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris and, this August, accused a top state elections official of “gaslighting” for saying there was no evidence of fraud in 2020.

In Ware County, in the southeast corner of the state, the election board chair is tied to far-right groups and has called democracy “mob rule.” In Troup County, which borders Alabama, the election board chair maintains that debunked “statistical anomalies” in the 2020 vote still haven’t been explained.

The legality of the rule was debated on Oct. 1 during back-to-back bench trials for two lawsuits. One was brought by the Democratic National Committee and others against the State Election Board, seeking to invalidate the rule. The other was brought by a Republican local board member against her county, the Democratic National Committee and others, seeking a judgment that she had the discretion not to certify election results.

During the trial, Judge Robert McBurney said to the lawyer representing the Republican board member, “You have very successfully pulled me down an intriguing rabbit hole about, well, maybe you could certify some of the votes, but not all of the votes.”

The boards’ new power is the culmination of ground-level efforts in Georgia that began the day Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. After Trump lost — and after Georgia’s Republican secretary of state rebuffed his demand to “find” him the 11,780 votes he would have needed to win — GOP state legislators launched an effort to reshape county election boards, paving the way for removing Democrats and stacking them with Trump backers. Boards are supposed to administer elections in a nonpartisan manner, and some of these changes broke with the norm of having equal numbers of........

© Salon