Georgia House considers scrapping touchscreen voting by this year’s midterm

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.

State Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, condemned the proposal, saying it would make it “easier to cheat and harder to vote.”

Athens-Clarke County Elections Board Chair Rocky Raffle called it a “half-formed proposal aimed at fixing an elections process that is not broken.”

Hand-counting ballots is more time-consuming and more error-prone than machine counts. It would require election workers to manually tally votes from the top of the ticket down to the county and municipal races and count every voter’s selection.

The committee’s chair, state Rep. Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, said “new information was brought to light about a potential solution for Georgia’s elections.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, we are taking the necessary time to vet this idea and ensure Georgia voters get the transparency, integrity and security they deserve from our elections procedures,” he said.

The committee was expected to consider the draft measure, likely by gutting an existing bill and replacing it with the new provisions.

Under the draft proposal, unofficial early voting results from touchscreens would be counted using QR codes printed on ballot receipts for quick results and would later be counted by hand for an official tabulation.

It’s unclear how much a new hybrid system would cost under the measure. The Election Day paper ballots would either be preprinted or printed by ballot-on-demand printers.

Hours earlier, a House study committee on elections released its recommendations calling for Georgia voters to switch to paper ballots on Election Day this year and requiring any ballots cast using Georgia’s touchscreen voting system to be hand-counted.

The report also recommended that the Legislature appropriate money to purchase a new statewide voting system in the 2027 fiscal year.

House Speaker Jon Burns lauded the study committee’s work.

“Georgia’s voters deserve a sustainable, long-term election process that enables trust, transparency and accountability, which is why I look forward to the committee’s continued work throughout the remainder of the year,” he said.

Two years ago, state lawmakers set a July 2026 deadline to eliminate the use of QR codes, but they did not allocate the money to get it done.