ATLANTA — Attorney General Chris Carr said the climbing number of election lawsuits against the state is wracking up a “significant” bill.

During the first day of House Public Safety Subcommittee of Appropriations meetings, Carr told lawmakers election litigation is putting a strain on government dollars and staff.

“We are currently maximizing our internal capacity with elections lawsuits against the state,” Carr said, “and there are more lawsuits coming our way this year and in the future.”

In the governor’s budget proposal, a one-time transfer of $194,237 in both 2020 and 2021 is moved from the Secretary of State’s budget to the Attorney General’s for “legal services to support election security.”

“Recently our state’s election laws have become a central focus of litigation,” Carr said. “The fiscal impact that this litigation will have on the state in the coming months and years is significant.”

That legal support would include an additional attorney in the elections litigation team. Such private attorneys qualified to handle elections cases, Carr said, are few and far between — often unable to represent cases due to conflicts of interest with the state.

Currently, the Attorney General’s office has two full-time attorneys that work “almost exclusively” on election litigation, the office’s spokeswoman said. Five additional in-house attorneys sometimes assist in election litigation on top of their traditional workload.

The state of Georgia is facing multiple lawsuits regarding voting rights issues. The Secretary of State and his office are in the center of two lawsuits filed by individuals and voting rights advocacy groups. Secretary of State’s office staff told reporters during an election system update meeting in November if Georgia becomes a swing state, election litigation will continue to pile up.

“Unfortunately, we have to spend a tremendous amount to time and energy dealing with ongoing litigation,” Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state, told lawmakers during budget hearings last week. “Because of one of those cases, our office is being faced with an additional, unplanned cost.”

Near the end of last year, a federal judge ordered the state to store all of the legacy voting equipment — with no end date set. Raffensperger said that after the office collects all of the remaining old equipment from counties next month, storage would cost the state $30,000 a month.

“As of today,” he said, “the length of that storage is indefinite.”

The additional election litigation costs are running against the governor’s mandated 4% and 6% budget cuts for state agencies in Fiscal Years 2020 and 2021.

“As we head into an election season again this year, followed by redistricting and subsequent elections in the future,” Carr told lawmakers. “The department needs additional support in order to continue to handle this increased workload.”