Georgia

Georgia Governor calls June special session over redistricting, ballot QR codes | Maya Homan and Alander Rocha/Georgia Recorder

Georgia lawmakers will reconvene in June for a special session to redraw the state’s political maps, Gov. Brian Kemp announced Wednesday. The move comes in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakened key protections under the Voting Rights Act. Lawmakers will also be tasked with addressing an upcoming deadline to change the state’s current election system, which relies on a ballot QR code to count votes. Under a state law passed in 2024, QR codes cannot be used for the official ballot count after July 1. Kemp broke with many other Republican-led states in the South when he announced that the state would not pursue redistricting ahead of the 2026 general election. Other states, like Alabama and Tennessee, have rushed to break up Black-majority districts since the ruling. Read Article

Georgia: Trump Administration Demands Names of 2020 Election Workers | Nick Corasanti, Richard Fausset and Alan Feuer/The New York Times

The Justice Department has demanded the identities of every worker who staffed the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., according to court records, escalating an ongoing federal investigation of the 2020 vote in Georgia’s most populous county that relies on false and debunked claims. The demand targets employees of Fulton County elections as well as volunteer poll workers, who likely numbered in the thousands during the 2020 election, according to court records. The demand, which came via a federal grand jury subpoena, appears to be the latest effort by President Trump and his administration to use the investigative power of the federal government to pursue false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. With midterm voting underway in many states, including Georgia, the effort risks further undermining public confidence and sowing chaos among voters. Read Article

Georgia: Judge denies Fulton County’s request for return of 2020 ballots seized in FBI raid | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice does not have to return 2020 election ballots seized by FBI agents to Fulton County. It is the latest twist in the bitter fight between Fulton County and the Trump administration over the county’s 2020 election records. Fulton could appeal the ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling is a substantial blow for Fulton officials as it may have been the county’s best shot at reclaiming the election documents. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said he agrees that the affidavit was troubling, but adamantly opposed Boulee’s ruling. He said the county would pursue all available legal options and called the culmination of the DOJ’s efforts to probe the 2020 election a coordinated effort aimed at harassing and intimidating the county. Read Article

Georgia voting machine deadline leaves counties with no way to run the 2026 election | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

The state of Georgia’s elections right now is anything but peachy. In abouThe 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. Read Article

Georgia’s voting technology blunder | Cory Doctorow/Medium

Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn’t exist. The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it’s far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a “standard” voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job. Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE — largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion — they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election. Read Article

Georgia elections board weighs paper ballots options for November voting | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Faced with a vote-counting system that may soon violate state law, the State Election Board is weighing Georgia’s backup system: paper ballots filled out by hand. The Republican-controlled board spent hours Wednesday debating its rulemaking authority and a proposal to abandon Georgia’s current touchscreen voting system that uses QR codes, unreadable by humans, to count votes. The proposal would switch the state to a system where voters would fill in bubbles on a paper ballot that would then be read by a scanner. Critics — including many local election officials — fear a midyear switch would cause disruption at the polls in November. Others said the rule change would overstep the board’s legal authority. Proponents say those concerns are overblown, noting that poll workers are supposed to be trained to use the backup system and a majority of the country already uses paper ballots. The move comes as the state hurtles toward a July deadline to eliminate using QR codes to tally votes, leaving election officials and elections in limbo with no clear plan for compliance. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers end annual session without settling conflict on voting machines | Charlotte Kramon and Jeff Amy/Associated Press

The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state’s voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground. The lawmakers’ failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session. “They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature. Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes. Read Article

Georgia: Elections bill capsizes on final day of 2026 session | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

In an unexpected twist, members of the House and Senate concluded the 2026 legislative session without ending their longstanding stalemate over election policy, as Georgia hurtles toward the deadline for removing QR codes from voters’ ballots without a clear solution in sight. The lack of a solution has some lawmakers calling on Gov. Brian Kemp to convene a special session to give them another shot at passing an elections bill this year. On the final legislative day, House lawmakers passed Senate Bill 214, a measure that would postpone lawmakers’ self-imposed deadline for removing QR codes from ballots until 2028 and direct the state to begin the process of procuring a new election system this upcoming February. But the bill never made it across the finish line in the Senate, which adjourned shortly after 1 a.m. without taking up the measure. Since the 2026 session was also the end of the biennium, all bills must be refiled next year and start the legislative process over. Read Article

Georgia: Fulton County alleges DOJ used  FBI raid to circumvent lawsuit, seize 2020 ballots | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

Fulton County officials fighting for the return of 2020 election materials seized by the FBI asked a federal judge Tuesday to order the Department of Justice (DOJ) to disclose details about its repeated attempts to obtain the county’s election records. In a new filing, the officials alleged that unusual events before the FBI’s raid strongly suggested that the DOJ, having previously sought the records through demand letters and a lawsuit, pursued a criminal investigation against the county to seize and access the documents by force. The county officials noted that the FBI’s January search was initiated around 48 days after the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sought the same records in a lawsuit filed in mid December and just days after the division ran into legal obstacles in that suit. Fulton County alleges DOJ used  FBI raid to circumvent lawsuit, seize 2020 ballots - Democracy Docket

Georgia Court of Appeals sides with Fulton County in fight over election board appointments | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Georgia’s Court of Appeals has overturned a trial court’s ruling ordering the Fulton County Board of Commissioners to seat two conservative election activists on the county election board or face daily fines. In May, Democrats on the board had rejected two Republican Party nominees, Julie Adams and Jason Frazier, citing concerns about both individuals’ past actions and arguing that they were not qualified for the position. But the Fulton County GOP filed a lawsuit arguing that the commissioners were required to approve the party’s nominees as long as they met basic required standards like living in the county, being a registered voter and not being an elected official. Read Article

Georgia was going to dump voting machines that Trump hates until things got complicated | Jeff Amy/Associated Press

It seemed like the stars had aligned for Republicans to get rid of their biggest targets — Georgia’s touch screen voting machines. But the complicated reality of changing voting systems has gotten in the way, despite the ascent of 2020 election deniers into influential places in state government and the second Donald Trump administration. Instead, it is looking increasingly likely that Georgia voters will still be casting ballots this November on the machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which was bought by a company called Liberty Vote. The machines print a paper ballot with a QR code, a type of barcode, that scanners use to tally votes. Republicans face hurdles in replacing Georgia's touch screen voting machines | AP News

Georgia State Election Board urges faster shift away from ballot QR codes | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Georgia’s State Election Board unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday urging state lawmakers to hasten a switch to hand-marked paper ballots, just a day after legislators unveiled a proposal to delay overhauling Georgia’s election system until after the 2026 midterms. The resolution, introduced by board member Salleigh Grubbs, requests that Georgia implement hand-marked paper ballots “as soon as practicable,” arguing that the state’s current system of using QR codes to tally ballots does not allow voters to fully proof their ballots before casting them. “I think this is an emergency in Georgia,” Grubbs said at a board meeting Wednesday. “I think a voting emergency should be declared.” Precisely what “practicable” means, though, is a matter of debate. House lawmakers unveiled a plan Tuesday to make the switch in time for the 2028 presidential election. Rep. Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who is sponsoring the bill in the House, said lawmakers had hoped to remove the QR codes by the original deadline of July, but “very quickly and very abruptly began to realize that the practicality of that happening without causing a severe upset in our election system, it just wasn’t gonna happen. It wasn’t possible.” Read Article

Georgia Republicans Are Setting Up Their Midterm Elections to Fail | Justin Glawe/The New Republic

Republicans in Georgia’s election-denial movement, along with their allies on the State Election Board and in the GOP-controlled state legislature, have been pushing for a complete prohibition on voting machines since President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden—a loss they falsely attribute to voting fraud, of course. These efforts culminated with the passage in May 2024 of Senate Bill 189, which prohibits Q.R. codes from being used to tabulate votes. That ban goes into effect on July 1. But state legislators, whose 2026 session ends a month from now, have yet to put forth a practical replacement system. Instead, Republican lawmakers have introduced three bills that seem expressly designed to cause chaos, if they could even be implemented in time for the fall elections; two of them call for poll workers—often low-paid temporary workers or retirees—to hand-count paper ballots in some or all cases. “It’s silly to imagine that people can hand-tally all those votes, get all the right totals in all the right places, and report accurate results by precinct in every contest—much less that they can do it quickly,” said Mark Lindeman of Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that works with bipartisan election officials to advocate for secure election equipment. “For anyone who craves more controversy and conflict after elections, full hand counts are a great idea—but for voters overall, absolutely not.” Read Article

Georgia: Hand-marked paper ballot bill fails ahead of deadline for changing elections | Mark Niesse/The Augusta Press

Georgia senators shot down a bill Friday that would have switched the state’s voting method to paper ballots filled out by hand before this November’s elections.The bill’s defeat sets up a scramble for Georgia lawmakers to find a way to remove computer QR codes from ballots this year, as required by a state law passed two years ago.The Senate voted 27-21 on the bill, two votes short of the majority needed for legislation to pass in the 56-member Senate. Seven senators skipped the vote following warnings of election “chaos” if it passed.“We’re at an impasse,” said Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania. “If we ignore it again, we’re just going to kick the can. Sooner or later, folks, you have to pay the piper, and it’s time to remove the QR codes.” Read Article

Georgia election bill SB 568 could change early voting rules, voting machines as debate over 2020 election and Trump claims continues | Zachary Bynum/CBS Atlanta

A proposed Georgia election bill could significantly reshape how voters cast ballots, how counties manage voter records, and how election equipment is used across the state — all as political debates tied to the 2020 election continue to influence policy in Georgia. Senate Bill 568 would introduce several changes to Georgia's election system, including new standards for voting machines, new rules for early voting locations, and requirements for counties to publish voter lists. Dr. Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, said the legislation builds on a series of election reforms Georgia lawmakers passed after the 2020 election. Read Article

Georgia: Election skeptics convinced criminal charges coming in Fulton County election case | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voting integrity advocates who believe the 2020 election was rife with fraud have been jubilant since the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots last month. They’ve been hailed as heroes for keeping the issue alive until the FBI intervened. And they’re convinced that prosecutions of election officials, politicians and even judges are coming. Election and legal experts who reviewed the evidence used to obtain the FBI search warrant have reached a different conclusion. They doubt the investigation will lead to successful prosecutions. They say the evidence of a crime is scant and the legal obstacles to prosecution are steep. “There is absolutely nothing in here that makes me believe — even if everything they said in the affidavit is true — that they could successfully prosecute anyone,” said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department attorney and law professor at Loyola Marymount University. Read Article

Georgia: Fulton County lawsuit claims feds used ‘gross mischaracterizations’ to justify raid | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

A former federal official who tested and certified voting machines used in Fulton County, Georgia for the 2020 presidential election told a court that the federal government misrepresented key facts and omitted exculpatory public evidence while seeking a warrant in last month’s law enforcement raid. The raid, carried out by the FBI and overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, saw agents seize ballots and other documentation from the Fulton County election offices. A public affidavit cited five core allegations related to the county’s recordkeeping, electronic ballot image storage, and election night reporting. Authorities allege these issues point to a potential conspiracy to intentionally manipulate the vote count in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Fulton County officials sued the federal government in response, arguing that the affidavit used to obtain a warrant for the raid “does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime.” Read Afrticle

Georgia: FBI raid of Fulton County was driven by Trump appointee, court docs show | Chloe Atkins, Ryan J. Reilly, Jane C. Timm and Corky Siemaszko/NBC

The FBI last month raided a Georgia election hub near Atlanta and seized ballots and voter records at the urging of a lawyer who had worked with President Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a newly released court record revealed Tuesday. FBI special agent Hugh Raymond Evans wrote in an affidavit that the investigation “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.” Olsen, who took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign more than five years ago and promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, was previously sanctioned by a federal judge for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions." He was hired last year by the administration to investigate the 2020 election. Read Article

Georgia House considers scrapping touchscreen voting by this year’s midterm elections | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the wake of an extraordinary FBI raid on a Fulton County elections office, Georgia Republican lawmakers are moving to rework how the state conducts its elections in advance of a crucial midterm election. Under a draft House proposal obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgians would have two in-person voting options for casting their ballot. Election Day voters would use hand-marked paper ballots, which would be tabulated by machines. Georgians voting early would be able to choose to fill out a ballot by hand or select their candidates using the current touchscreen system, which prints out a paper ballot receipt. Touchscreen votes would be hand-counted. The proposal was expected to be considered in the House Governmental Affairs Committee on Monday, but the meeting was called off after the proposal’s language immediately sparked controversy among local election officials and Democrats. Read Article

Georgia: Fulton County to challenge FBI seizure of election documents | George Chidi/The Guardian

Fulton county leaders said they would fire back in court on Monday, intent on limiting the scope of a federal warrant that led the FBI to seize 2020 elections documents last week. County attorneys intend to file a motion in federal court asking for an order mandating the return of property that was unlawfully seized or retained, said the Fulton county commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. “By removing ballots and other election materials from their secure, locally controlled environment, the chain of custody is broken, rendering any future claims from those materials unreliable,” said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a non-profit that advocates for election security and the use of paper ballots. “Fulton county’s voters are relying on their election officials to prepare – without disruption – for a new election that is just around the corner,” Smith said. “At the behest of the administration, which has no role in the conduct of elections, this raid is manufacturing chaos, intimidating election workers, and sowing distrust ahead of the state’s primaries, this year’s midterms, and the 2028 presidential election.” Read Article

Georgia: FBI seizes 2020 ballots in Fulton County in apparently unprecedented action, alarming local officials | Luke Barr, Olivia Rubin, and Pierre Thomas/ABC

Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county's Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI earlier Wednesday said they were conducting court-authorized activity at the facility. The development comes after President Donald Trump has repeatedly said there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election. Fulton County officials expressed concern over the seizure of the ballots. "These are the original voting records, original absentee ballots," Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington, a Democrat, told ABC News regarding the materials seized by the FBI. "Once that stuff leaves our custody, where is the chain of custody? How can we know if we're going to get everything back? How can we know if they might do something mischievous?" Read Article

Georgia: Activists continue push for paper ballots ahead of midterms | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Dozens of activists packed into the state Capitol on Tuesday, touting their latest report alleging errors in Georgia elections and calling for a switch to hand-marked paper ballots rather than Georgia’s touchscreen voting system. Among a group of activists on Tuesday holding signs that read “PAPER PLEASE” and “UN-PLUG GA,” was Field Searcy, cofounder of the conservative group Georgians for Truth, which advocates for paper ballots. He claimed state law already on the books would allow the state to ditch Georgia’s touchscreen system. Tuesday’s news conference by the paper-ballot activists comes four months before the May 19 primaries for the 2026. Read Article

Georgia: Fate of ballot QR codes unclear as deadline for their removal looms | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Election season in Georgia is here, with statewide primary elections less than four months away and the campaigning for those contests well underway. But as Georgians prepare to cast their ballots, a key question remains unclear: Will the state be able to eliminate QR codes from ballots to comply with a 2024 state election law? During the second day of budget hearings at the state Capitol, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger appeared before lawmakers to discuss Gov. Brian Kemp’s proposed budget for his office. The hearings will continue into Thursday, with Attorney General Chris Carr and other law enforcement and public safety-related agency heads scheduled to present. Kemp’s budget proposal for the secretary of state’s office includes $1.8 million for optical character recognition technology that can be used to scan the human-readable text on ballots and $5 million toward a hand count verifying the outcomes of two statewide races during the 2026 cycle, Raffensperger told lawmakers Wednesday. Read Article

Georgia: Official says law Trump is using to seek legal fees in election case likely unconstitutional | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

The head of a nonpartisan group that supports Georgia prosecutors said the new state law that President Donald Trump and others charged in an election interference case are using to seek millions in attorney fees and costs from the Fulton County district attorney’s office is likely unconstitutional. The law has “serious and potentially unconstitutional deficiencies,” notably because it denies county governments any sort of due process when defendants in a case request reimbursement, Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council Executive Director Pete Skandalakis wrote in a court filing Wednesday. Georgia state legislators last year passed a law that says that if a prosecutor is disqualified from a case because of their own improper conduct and the case is then dismissed, anyone charged in that case is entitled to request “all reasonable attorney’s fees and costs incurred” in their defense. The judge overseeing the case then is responsible for reviewing the request and awarding the fees and costs, which are to be paid from the budget of the prosecutor’s office. Read Article

Meet Georgia’s most influential conspiracy theorist | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Garland Favorito has said the U.S. government covered up the truth about the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He’s said the Israeli government — not Osama bin Laden — may have been responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And he’s echoed an antisemitic claim that Jewish-controlled media have concealed grand conspiracies against the American people.Now the 75-year-old Roswell resident has become a leader among conservatives who say the 2020 presidential election in Georgia was rife with fraud. Favorito has spent five years in court seeking to review Fulton County’s 2020 ballots. He believes it will show counterfeit ballots cost President Donald Trump the election here — though he doesn’t know who orchestrated the scheme. “We don’t know (who did it). We haven’t seen the ballots,” Favorito said in a recent interview. “As long as the ballots remain secret, the cover-up continues.” Investigators found numerous problems with Fulton County’s handling of the election, but no intentional misconduct. Joe Biden’s victory was confirmed by two recounts — including a computer count and a hand count of every ballot cast.Favorito is not deterred. He’s filed multiple lawsuits seeking to scan and inspect the 2020 ballots. And he’s not fighting alone. Read Article

Georgia: ‘Who’s Gonna Stop You?’ Listen to Trump Press Georgia Speaker Over 2020 Vote | Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim/The New York Times

In a newly obtained recording of a phone call from late 2020, President Trump can be heard pressing the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives to hold a special legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss. After citing false conspiracy theories of election fraud in Georgia, Mr. Trump told David Ralston, the speaker at the time, in the call on Dec. 7, 2020, that he could justify calling a special legislative session by saying it was “for transparency, and to uncover fraud.” Mr. Trump added, “Who’s gonna stop you for that?” Mr. Ralston, a Republican lawyer who died in 2022, responded with a chuckle, “A federal judge, possibly.”

Georgia: DOJ files suit to obtain 2020 election records in Fulton County | Zoë Richards/NBC

The Justice Department sued Fulton County, Georgia, this week in an effort to obtain more than five-year-old ballots tied to the 2020 presidential election which President Donald Trump lost. The eight-page complaint filed in federal court in Atlanta on Thursday names Fulton County Clerk of Courts Che Alexander as a defendant, alleging that the clerk violated the Civil Rights Act by failing to produce records tied to the 2020 presidential election as requested by state and federal officials. The lawsuit asks that the court demand that the records be produced within five days of a court order. According to the lawsuit, the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections last month refused to comply with an Oct. 6 subpoena, from the state's election board, for election records, including used and void ballots, stubs and signature envelopes from the 2020 presidential election, saying in a Nov. 14 letter that the records were "under seal" in accord with state law. Read Article

Georgia election board rejects rule change on using hand-marked paper ballots | Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback/Associated Press

Georgia’s State Election Board on Wednesday rejected a proposal defining when hand-marked paper ballots could be used in place of the state’s touchscreen voting machines. Opponents said the rule would have overstepped the board’s legal authority and could have created an escape hatch for widespread use of paper ballots when state lawmakers mandated the use of the ballot-marking devices. Janice Johnston, the board’s vice chair, seemed to agree, saying, “This really is the duty and the job of the legislators.” The proposed rule failed on a 2-2 vote after a debate in which proponents contended that use of the current machines at least sometimes violates the law because voters can’t read their ballots’ QR code to ensure it matches the paper ballot, and because machines don’t afford enough privacy to voters. Read Article

Georgia: Fight Over 2020 Election Persists as Midterms Approach | Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset/The New York Times

The election interference case against President Trump in Georgia was dismissed last week, but the ghosts of the 2020 election are still looming over the state as next year’s midterms approach. Mr. Trump’s Justice Departmenta has been investigating Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta who brought criminal charges against him. Though the full contours of the investigation are unclear, The New York Times has learned that several dozen subpoenas have already been issued, according to a copy of one of them and interviews with veterans of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Georgia. Federal prosecutors are separately trying to obtain copies of tens of thousands of ballots that were cast in Georgia in 2020. And races for governor and other statewide offices feature candidates who actively helped or resisted the president’s efforts to cling to power after he lost in 2020. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers weigh seismic changes to voting equipment | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Ahead of the momentous 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s state leaders faced a choice. The state’s voting system prior to that year consisted of 27,000 electronic voting machines that had been in use since 2002, which were reaching the end of their life and needed to be replaced. Legislators at the time voted for Georgia’s new election system largely along party lines, with Democrats largely favoring hand-marked paper ballots that require voters to fill out ballots with pencils or pens, and Republicans supporting ballot-marking devices, which still required voters to make selections on a machine but produced a paper ballot that would be scanned to tabulate the results. The new machines, purchased for $107 million and manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, were used statewide in Georgia for the first time during the 2020 election. But nearly six years later, Democrats and Republicans have seemingly found themselves on opposite ends of a similar debate. Some GOP lawmakers are now leading a push to replace ballot-marking devices with hand-marked paper ballots, and there are Democrats who are cautioning against abandoning Georgia’s current ballot-marking device system before the end of the state’s 10-year contract in 2029. Read Article