Georgia is shopping for a new voting system for 2028, but is there time?

“We’ve got a lot of work to do. Certainly, the procurement timeline is critical,” said state Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania.

New equipment statewide comes with a steep price tag. Georgia’s current voting equipment was purchased for $107 million in 2019. But some Republicans have been beating the drum for a new system ever since President Donald Trump’s close loss in 2020, with activists pushing for a system that primarily uses hand-marked ballots.

Georgia is one of the few states with a unified, statewide system for conducting elections.

If state lawmakers can agree on a new system, Department of Administrative Services Commissioner Rebecca Sullivan has said procurement would take four to six months.

It’s not often jurisdictions purchase voting machines — usually once a decade and sometimes less — and government contracts can be challenged as companies try to halt deals with competitors.

“Government moves slowly, and the procurement window is a significant challenge,” said Scot Turner, a former state representative and executive director of the conservative group Eternal Vigilance Action. “They’ll have to pass a bill very quickly in 2027.”

A committee of state lawmakers and other officials is charged with issuing recommendations by late January — at which point the legislative session will be well underway.

Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC

Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC

State Rep. Scott Holcomb, the committee’s sole Democrat, said that there are many factors to consider when mapping out a future system, including the accuracy, initial and long-term costs, security, ease of use, and efficiency. Election security advocates have raised concerns that, if the Legislature decides on widespread use of ballot-on-demand printing, it will unnecessarily add complexity, cost and more security weaknesses.

“Before building thousands of miniature risk-laden ballot factories, the committee should slow down and listen to experts who understand the risks,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for hand-marked ballots.

Marks said that such printers are a useful tool in a limited capacity, like large counties with many ballot permutations.

What is ultimately settled on next year might look nothing like what the committee suggests. The state will have a new governor with power to sign or veto legislation, the Senate will have a new president, and the secretary of state’s office will have a freshly minted elections chief to certify the next system. And the grip Republicans have in each legislative chamber may also loosen if Democrats pick up seats or possibly flip a chamber.

A hefty lift

Getting politicians to agree on a new system is only the first step. A vendor must be selected, the system has to be certified by the secretary of state, new equipment would need to be deployed and tested across Georgia’s 159 counties, and county election officials would need to train their workers on it.

“Election officials are always expected to adapt to whatever is thrown at us — that doesn’t mean it’s not challenging,” said Greene County Elections Director Rebecca Anglin.

She hopes the state can avoid a fiasco akin to what happened after Georgia purchased the current system.

Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC

Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC

The June 2020 primaries were marred by long lines, technical difficulties and voter confusion. Making matters worse, during the COVID-19 pandemic, officials trained many poll workers on the new machines online and contended with social distancing and sanitizing equipment that added to congestion at the polls.

Lawmakers aim to have the new system in place before the 2028 presidential preference primary, which typically lands in March. Failure to pass legislation during next year’s session could place lawmakers in familiar territory.

The Legislature passed a bill two years ago doing away with counting ballots by the QR codes printed on ballots by July 1, 2026, but legislators failed to find an alternative vote-tallying system. They set a new deadline of Jan. 1, 2028, during a special legislative session in June, but that doesn’t mean the fight is over.

Voting touchscreens

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who certified the states’ current system, has defended it every step of the way. But the Republican-controlled Legislature has declined to pour more money into the system.

Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC

Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC

Officials have skipped security updates for the machines, and experts have also raised concerns about another weakness that, if exploited, allows people to identify how someone voted, which they say has become increasingly easy to do with the widespread use of artificial intelligence.

State officials have directed counties to restrict access to records that were previously public and said they are working with vendors about scrambling ballot images and shuffling other voting records before making them public to ensure such records cannot be used to identify how someone voted.

There’s no indication that the state’s voting machines have been tampered with during an election.

As for the current hardware, county election officials say it increasingly requires more maintenance.

“We’re having a lot of issues with scanners,” said Paulding County Election Director Deidre Holden during a recent committee meeting. “We clean them, we do. I mean, we pray over them. We do whatever we’ve got to do to make sure they’re going to work.”