Most years, Gov. Brian Kemp ends the legislative session weighing whether to sign a handful of controversial bills among the hundreds on his desk.
This year, the bigger question is whether he calls lawmakers back for a special session to remake Georgia’s elections process.
Lawmakers passed a law two years ago requiring them to overhaul Georgia’s voting system by July 1 of this year. But the Legislature adjourned last week without a plan to do it.
Now, lawmakers must come back for a special session to fix it or risk a possible court fight that could plunge election law into deeper limbo ahead of the midterms.
The next move belongs to Kemp, who spent nearly a decade as Georgia’s top elections official but would much rather close out his final session as governor talking about affordability and tax cuts.
Instead, he now faces a looming clash over one of the most politically combustible issues in Georgia.
Complicating Kemp’s decision is the calendar itself. A special session would likely last at least five days, and the May 19 primary is fast approaching with early voting starting in weeks. Calling lawmakers back soon would pull candidates off the campaign trail at a pivotal stretch.
Wait until after the primary, though, and the window narrows again: top races are likely headed to a four-week runoff campaign culminating in a June 16 vote. By then, Atlanta will be consumed by World Cup matches that will bring tens of thousands of fans to downtown through June and July.
Kemp is also under pressure to call lawmakers back for a separate situation: the property tax overhaul approved in the session’s closing minutes.
Democrats say it could be unconstitutional because it started as a Senate bill on hemp regulation, despite Georgia law requiring revenue-raising measures to originate in the House.
Kemp’s spokesman, Carter Chapman, offered little hint of where the governor stands, saying Kemp’s office will begin a “thorough bill and budget review process” on Monday.
He added that Kemp and his aides “will analyze all the bills that passed the General Assembly, as well as the consequences of those that did not pass.”
Others see little way around a special session, lest a judge step in.
“This is a legislative problem,” said state Rep. Victor Anderson, the House committee chairman who sponsored the bipartisan effort to resolve the election mess by pushing back the deadline. “It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”
‘Unresolvable’
At the center of that dispute is Georgia’s Dominion Voting Systems ballot-marking system, which prints a paper ballot with a QR code. Machines then use those QR codes to count the ballots.
Conservative activists distrust those QR codes because humans can’t read them, making it impossible for voters to verify what the machine is counting. Those machines became a fixation for President Donald Trump after his 2020 defeat in Georgia, and his allies at the Capitol responded in 2024 by passing a law banning the barcodes and accelerating a shift to hand-marked paper ballots.
But counties are still required to use the existing machines, and lawmakers have not set aside the money needed to replace them.
House Speaker Jon Burns backed a bipartisan proposal that would have allowed counties to continue using the machines through this election cycle and pushed the deadline for the switch to 2028.
That way, Burns said, Georgia wouldn’t have to “switch horses midstream” with a midterm election looming.
The Senate never took it up. Now the state is barreling toward a legal and logistical mess.
“We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” said Anderson.
Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper, one of her party’s elections experts, said the standoff leaves little wiggle room.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
A judge’s order could inject even more unpredictability, she said, while a special session risks opening the door to a broader rewrite of election law just months before the midterms.
“Unfortunately, Senate Republicans put their political interests above serving Georgia voters this session,” she said.
A long list
The elections standoff is only one of the governor’s challenges. Kemp has until May 12 to sign, veto or quietly allow legislation to become law.
Here’s a look at other major measures awaiting his decision.
Taxes
Perhaps the biggest headline of the session is House Bill 463, which cuts Georgia’s income tax rate from 5.19% to 4.99% immediately and lays out a path to 3.99% over eight years if revenue targets are met. It also boosts the standard deduction and exempts up to $1,750 each in tips and overtime pay from state taxes.
He’s also expected to sign scaled-back property tax relief after a broader House-backed cap on levy growth failed. Senate Bill 33 limits annual growth in assessments to the rate of inflation.
Budget
The only must-pass measure of the session, the state’s $38.5 billion spending plan includes $70 million for statewide literacy coaches, additional money for a cost-of-living raise for retired state workers, plus funding for infrastructure priorities and other projects. While the governor will sign the overall bill, don’t be surprised to see him carve out specific projects he deems wasteful or unnecessary.
Literacy
One of the session’s defining policies, the literacy overhaul outlined in House Bill 1193 places specialized reading coaches in elementary schools statewide and cements the “science of reading” teaching method.
Protest penalties
One of the few culture war measures that passed, Senate Bill 443 would increase penalties for blocking roads and highways during protests, raising the offense to a high and aggravated misdemeanor and allowing civil lawsuits. It’s likely to draw close scrutiny from civil liberties groups.
Needs-based college scholarship bill
Lawmakers approved a major higher education measure that puts $325 million into a need-based college scholarship fund for lower-income families. It would also add advanced placement fine arts courses to the calculation of students grade-point averages when determining eligibility for Georgia’s popular Hope Scholarship. It’s a big-ticket item that Kemp helped champion and marks a major change in state education policy.
Metro Atlanta elections
Over fierce Democratic opposition, Republicans voted to make some local races in Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties nonpartisan starting in 2028. It would apply to district attorneys, tax commissioners and other local posts.
Stripping party labels from those offices would make it easier for Republicans to make inroads into Georgia’s most reliably Democratic region, while also punishing Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis and other local officials Republicans see as too liberal. Kemp is likely to sign the bill, which is expected to immediately trigger a legal challenge.
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