Secretary of state candidates weigh in on Georgia election crisis

The solution to the conundrum overhanging how Georgia will conduct elections is at an impasse.

A state law goes into effect July 1, making the way the state currently counts ballots with QR codes illegal.

While Democratic and Republican candidates running for secretary of state don’t always see eye to eye on how Georgians should cast ballots or how votes are counted, many agree that Gov. Brian Kemp should call a special session to address a deadline that threatens to throw the midterms in jeopardy.

Republicans Vernon Jones, Ted Metz and Gabriel Sterling all said that Kemp needs to call the Legislature back into session to fix the mess. Democrats Cam Ashling and Dana Barrett also think a special legislative session is needed.

Among the GOP candidates, only Kelvin King expressed doubts, saying he has “very little confidence” state lawmakers could agree on a solution, and called for an immediate switch to the state’s official backup system: hand-marked paper ballots.

Republican Tim Fleming and Democrats Adrian Consonery Jr. and Penny Brown Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment.

Conservative activists have called for the state to ditch its touchscreen voting machines since President Donald Trump and his allies, without evidence, blamed the machines for losing the state and his reelection in 2020. The computer-readable QR codes printed on each ballot receipt only fueled conspiracy theories about the machines.

Advocates for changing how Georgia votes say stripping away QR codes, unreadable by humans, from ballots and ditching Georgia’s touchscreens will restore voters’ confidence in election results.

“When voters can see their vote and I know it’s counted exactly as cast, confidence in elections starts to come back,” said Jones, a former state representative.

Lawmakers passed a bill two years ago barring the state from counting ballots with QR codes and setting a July deadline for the ban, but they did not allocate the money to make it happen. They had a chance to fix that this year, either by funding a switch to a different system or changing the deadline, but they did neither.

Where Democrats are on the issue is complicated. Before it became an issue backed by MAGA Republicans, Democrats supported the idea of paper ballots where voters bubbled in their choices. Ashling still supports that solution.

“If we continue with the … machines as is, we’re going to constantly face the downfall of losing public trust,” she said.

But switching voting methods in the middle of an election year could be risky.

Local election officials have said it’s not feasible. It’s something that Sterling echoed in an interview on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Politically Georgia” podcast. He called changing the system for November’s midterms “literally insane.”

“You’re asking for issues,” he said. “You’re going to create all the stuff you say you’re trying to fight. So the reality is we should responsibly do this over the next few years.”

Hand counts

Even if the change was made, candidates disagree over whether hand-marked ballots should be counted by machine or by hand, a time-consuming and more error-prone process. Metz, who has previously run for governor as a Libertarian, said machines are hackable.

“In order to restore confidence and trust in elections, hand-counting the ballots in public for public inspection, livestreamed over the internet, will eliminate any sort of mistrust in the elections,” said Metz, who thinks the voting system already violates state and federal law.

Many supporters of machine counts advocate for taking a sample of ballots to audit by hand rather than manually counting every ballot, which could take days to complete for one race in some large counties.

Democrat Barrett thinks the controversy over QR codes is overblown and that hand-marked paper ballots aren’t a long-term solution.

“We moved away from hand-marked paper ballots because they are so fraught,” Barrett said.

She advocated for a hybrid system where Georgians enter their votes on a machine and receive a printed receipt showing how their votes were cast. She said a copy of such receipts should be stored in case a hand recount is needed.

If the General Assembly were serious about overhauling the system, there should have already been a plan in place, she said.