How the Georgia legislature left counties with no way to run the 2026 election

“​​ This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday . Hi, y’all, The state of Georgia’s elections right now is anything but peachy. In about 10 weeks , county election officials are required to stop using their current voting system — but the state hasn’t told them what to replace it with. Right now, Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen ballot-marking devices manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems ( recently purchased and rebranded as Liberty Vote ). Georgia rolled the machines out just before the 2020 election, as part of a sweeping and expensive statewide modernization effort — spurred in part by a 2019 federal court ruling that barred continued use of the paperless touchscreen systems the state had relied on since the early 2000s. The newer machines print a paper ballot listing the voter’s choices in plain English next to a QR code encoding the same choices. When ballots are tabulated, the scanners read the QR code — not the printed text beside it — to count the vote. That design has long drawn fire from both Republicans and Democrats, who argue voters can’t actually verify what a QR code says, only the text next to it. That complaint gained political traction on the right after the 2020 election, and in 2024 the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature passed a law banning the use of QR codes in tabulation starting on July 1, 2026. But the law left the hard questions — what replacement system to use, how to pay for it, and how to transition — unanswered. The legislature was supposed to fill in the gaps this year, but it adjourned earlier this month without doing so. “They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” state Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat, told the Associated Press after the session ended. It’s a blunt assessment, but it fits. As the deadline approached for legislators to propose alternatives, some state lawmakers acknowledged the timeline wouldn’t work. Anderson warned that switching systems too quickly could cause a “ severe upset ” to Georgia’s elections. A compromise bill from House Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Victor Anderson, a Republican, would have let counties keep the current system through 2026 while requiring the state to do away with QR codes by 2028. It passed the House, but Senate Republicans declined to take it up. The result is an unfunded mandate dropped onto the 159 counties that actually run elections in Georgia — offices that print ballots, program scanners, train poll workers, and now must prepare for November using procedures the state has not chosen, with equipment it has not bought, under a law it has not fixed. Lawmakers are at least aware of the urgency to find a solution before the general election. (Georgia’s primary and any necessary runoffs fall before the transition deadline.) Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican, has said he will talk to GOP Gov. Brian Kemp about a special legislative session to address the issue. Any resolution now would likely require either a special session or a court order — and would almost certainly mean delaying the deadline. Even if lawmakers reconvened, agreed on a new system, and funded it tomorrow, there’s no realistic way the market could design, certify, and deploy it before November. After that, the options are limited. The secretary of state’s office could try to update the current system to use optical character recognition so that the printed text, not QR codes, is what’s used in tabulation, even if the codes still appear on the ballots. Some have suggested not using machines at all and hand-counting all ballots, the procedure Georgia is already supposed to use in emergency situations. But that’s a nonstarter with election officials. “We shouldn’t plan to have an emergency in November,” Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration & Election Officials, told Capitol Beat News Service . At a recent state Election Board meeting , Fulton County Elections Director Nadine Williams said hand-counting one contest in 2020 required roughly 275 two-person teams working four to five days; scaling that to a full ballot would likely cost millions. It’s not like no one saw this coming. Gabe Sterling, the chief operating officer in Raffensperger’s office and a Republican candidate for secretary of state, has spent two years warning lawmakers that the QR code ban is “a solution in search of a problem” and “impossible” on the timeline they set. His office estimates it would cost $25 million to $26 million to modify the current system, and up to $300 million to replace it. The legislature appropriated nothing. This is the part that often gets lost when a legislature writes an election mandate and walks away: Someone still has to run the election. In Georgia, that someone is usually a small county office working with whatever the state provides. Right now, the state has provided only a deadline. Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org .

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