Georgia lawmakers end session without fixing a threat to its midterm elections

Georgia’s election system is flirting with disarray, experts say, after the state Senate failed overnight to push back a deadline that requires Georgia to get rid of its current voting system, which uses QR codes, before the November midterm elections.

A bill that would have extended the deadline for eliminating the QR codes to 2028 died in the state Senate early Friday after having passed the state House of Representatives just hours earlier Thursday night.

The speaker of the House, Jon Burns, a Republican, said it was “a little troubling” that the Senate did not address the looming deadline by taking up the bill.

“We think we had a reasonable plan that would allow us to move forward with our elections, and have transparency and bring credibility to our elections,” Burns said. “You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream.”

The potential trouble in Georgia stems from the conspiratorial thinking that has consumed many Republicans since late 2020, when President Donald Trump claimed, without proof, that the presidential election had been stolen from him. Trump has also made unfounded accusations that Georgia’s voting machines were part of a conspiracy to flip votes.

Trump’s allies in the Republican-dominated state legislature then got behind a 2024 law to eliminate QR codes that are used to tabulate votes, by July 1 of this year.

Electoral confusion could cast doubts on election outcomes, particularly in this year’s midterms, when Trump’s party could be dragged down by his sagging poll numbers. Georgia is hosting one of the most closely watched midterm elections, in which Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, will face reelection, squaring off against the winner of an upcoming Republican primary.

Vasu Abhiraman, vice chair of the election board in DeKalb County, said in an interview earlier this week that “we do not want a major transition in the summertime, in the middle of this election cycle.”

“It’s going to be total chaos,” he said.

The Senate is led by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, one of 16 Republicans who acted as fake electors during Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 defeat. Jones is running for governor and won Trump’s early endorsement in the Republican primary.

Jones left the Statehouse Friday morning without speaking to reporters, and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

In an appearance on Real America’s Voice earlier this week, Jones said he supported a different measure introduced this session that would have required establishing a system of hand-marked paper ballots before the July 1 deadline.

“We’re putting a lot of pressure on the House to get it done,” Jones said. “We’re hopeful to get this done.”

Burns, the House speaker, said he would contemplate the possibility of the legislature reconvening to address the QR issue. Scot Turner, a former Republican state legislator and the executive director of Eternal Vigilance Action, a nonprofit that advocates election integrity, said he would consider suing to ensure Georgia doesn’t rush to overhaul its voting system on the eve of the midterm election season.

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, could also call a special session of the legislature, a rarity in the state.

A spokesperson for Kemp, Carter Chapman, said that the governor would consider what to do next during his standard legislative review process beginning Monday.

“The governor’s office will analyze bills that passed the General Assembly, as well as the consequences of those that did not pass,” he said.

The dispute centers on touch-screen voting machines, which voters use to make their ballot choices. Each person’s choices are then printed out on a sheet of paper, along with a QR code – which includes the same information in a form unreadable to humans but readable by computers. Voters review their choices on the sheet of paper, then take it to a scanner, which uses the QR code as the basis for tabulating the votes. Critics say that the QR codes do not allow voters to verify their choices when they review their ballots.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who is also running for governor, has said the cost of moving to a new system without QR codes would be millions of dollars. But the state legislature has not provided the funding to make the switch.

“It’s disappointing to see Georgia lawmakers act like Washington politicians – passing mandates without funding them,” said Jordan Fuchs, a spokesperson for Raffensperger. “Voters deserve better.”

The July deadline weighed heavily on several state lawmakers Thursday, the last day of their yearly legislative session.

“Changing our election system is not easy,” state Rep. Victor Anderson, a Republican, said Thursday night. “Honestly, we should have started long before now.”

The bill the state Senate failed to pass was supported by Georgia’s local election officials.

Now, as it stands, elections officials in the state’s 159 counties will be able to use the old QR code-based system for the midterm primaries in May, as well as for the primary runoff in June.

But they will be hard-pressed to make the needed changes by the November midterms.

The state already has an established system that allows voters to use hand-marked paper ballots in the event of an emergency. But these are typically isolated cases – for instance, when a polling place experiences a power outage. Abhiraman said that using that system statewide to address the removal of the QR codes might not be legally permissible.

Another headache: Georgians are allowed to vote before Election Day at early voting sites anywhere in their county of residence. The current touch-screen system shows voters their customized electronic ballots, which includes the specific races that they are allowed to vote in. A move to hand-marked ballots, Abhiraman said, would mean that every early voting site would have to print up every permutation of the ballots.

In DeKalb alone, he said, those permutations number in the hundreds.

A second possible solution, Abhiraman said, would be to distribute optical character recognition software to the counties, which could make text on the ballots readable by computers, and thus subject to a machine count. Under this scenario, Abhiraman said, the QR codes would still be used for a preliminary tabulation of the votes, with the optical recognition software then used to tabulate the official, certified vote.

But Abhiraman said that this system might also be vulnerable to potential legal challenges. And, he added, someone would have to pay for the software, and election workers would have to be trained, in a hurry, on how to use it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.