Travis Doss has worked in Georgia elections for more than three decades. He was there for the rollout of the state’s Diebold voting machines in the early 2000s and for the installation of the current Dominion voting system.
Both times, there was at least a road map. Now, there isn’t. Starting July 1, the way Georgia counts its votes will be illegal. Georgia election officials are hurtling toward that deadline with no clear direction in sight, as state lawmakers adjourned earlier this month without providing a solution.
“I have never been a part of a process where there’s been this type of uncertainty and timeline,” said the Richmond County elections director.
Georgia ballots have QR codes on them. Machines use these codes to count the ballots. The Republican-controlled state Legislature passed a law two years ago outlawing the QR codes, which critics say voters cannot read to verify their votes.
But lawmakers never approved money to make changes to the current system or buy new machines. Come July, Georgia’s touchscreen voting system won’t be able to legally count votes. For now, election officials are gearing up for the May 19 primaries, something the secretary of state’s election director, Blake Evans, has urged them to focus on.
“We must not let the uncertainty after July 1, 2026, distract us (from) conducting the best May 19 election possible for the voters of Georgia,” Evans wrote.
Past the primaries, election officials say they’re unable to do much of anything to prepare for November.
“Really, all I can do is have the people in place and have them on the ready to be trained,” Paulding County Elections Director Diedre Holden said.
Gov. Brian Kemp could call lawmakers back for a special session to wade into one of the state’s most politically contentious issues. And pressure for such a move is building. The Georgia American Civil Liberties Union and other left-leaning groups wrote a letter to Kemp urging him to bring lawmakers back to Atlanta to push back the July deadline. If nothing’s done, it could be up to the courts to determine how to proceed.
Georgia’s voting system has been the subject of conspiracy theories after President Donald Trump’s narrow 2020 loss in Georgia. There is no evidence Georgia’s system has flipped votes. But it’s been a fixation of the president and his loyalists. Trump has said he regrets not calling in the military to seize voting machines in 2020.
A proposal pushed by Republican state senators would have replaced the machines with hand-marked paper ballots. Meanwhile, a measure that drew bipartisan support in the House called for keeping the current system this year and transitioning to a new system by 2028. Neither proposal passed.
Paper ballots
The Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit that focuses on election security, has asked the Republican-controlled State Election Board to force Georgia’s 159 counties to use the backup system — hand-marked paper ballots counted by machines. The board could consider the petition this week.
The backup system is usually used during power outages or other events that would make it “impossible” or “impracticable” to use the touchscreen voting system.
Local election officials are supposed to train poll workers how to use the backup system. But Doss, the former president of an organization of local election officials, said his Richmond County poll workers have never used it.
“Do we really want the first time to use the emergency backup system to be during a November gubernatorial election?” he said.
Richmond County has more than 147,000 registered voters. Using a hand-marked paper ballot system would require more than 60 different versions of ballots to accommodate all of the configurations of voting districts and races in November, Doss said. In large metro Atlanta counties, there could be hundreds of different ballot permutations required to accommodate hundreds of thousands of voters.
Morgan County Democratic Party Chair Jeanne Dufort, one of the co-petitioners of the paper ballots proposal, said she takes the concerns of election officials seriously but that she thinks some of those concerns could be addressed.
“The election directors are raising questions that are easily answerable,” she said. “But in the absence of hearing answers from people with experience, they’re susceptible to fear.”
Election security advocates are concerned about Georgia’s touchscreen voting system because of its known vulnerabilities. They fear the system could be tampered with or hacked, which could alter results. Election officials have defended the system, saying such vulnerabilities couldn’t be exploited during an election.
In December, the state board rejected a proposal that would define when the state could use the backup hand-marked paper ballot system in place of Georgia’s voting touch screens. But without another solution in sight, the latest proposal could gain traction.
But the proposal is certain to receive pushback — familiar territory for a board controlled by three right-wing Republicans. The Georgia Supreme Court struck down several of the board’s proposed rule changes in 2024.
Another idea that worries Holden, the Paulding County elections director, is if the state opts for a switch to hand-counted paper ballots. She said she’s had several poll workers say they’ll quit if hand counts are required during the general election.
While hand counting ballots is tedious and more error-prone, it would especially impact large counties where hundreds of thousands of votes are cast. In 2020, a full hand-count audit of the presidential race took days for hundreds of poll workers to count in Fulton County, the state’s most populous county.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
A workaround?
The secretary of state’s office has proposed using computers to read the text printed on the ballots to count votes rather than the QR codes. The voting machines would still count ballots using QR codes on election night. Later, the state would use this optical character recognition technology to count ballots and comply with the state law banning the QR codes.
This would cost taxpayers about $300,000 per election. Georgia has the money to pay for it because lawmakers included $1.8 million in the 2026 budget to use this technology.
But is it legal? When pressed in an interview on Wednesday, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger couldn’t say.
“You’d have to ask a lawyer,” he said. “I’m an engineer.”
State Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, has questioned whether using the technology would be legal without certification from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Raffensperger, the state’s top election official and a leading defender of the state’s voting machines, said the July deadline is the state Legislature’s problem.
“They never funded anything. It’s the height of irresponsibility,” he said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
For now, election officials across the state are focused on what’s in front of them.
“We have to deal with the knowns, and what we know is that we have to use the equipment through the primary and the primary runoff,” Doss said.
“There are 159 counties and we have no clue what’s going to happen,” said Holden.
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