Georgia lawmakers will meet next week in a special legislative session to decide what replaces the use of QR codes on printed ballots when votes are tabulated. The clock is already set to July 1, when that method can no longer be used, leaving the Georgia General Assembly with one session to settle a problem that touches how ballots are counted.
That is why the Georgia election ballot QR code fight is being watched so closely now. The deadline is not a distant policy debate. It is the point at which the state must have a working alternative in place, or the system that reads printed ballots will have to change all at once.
Brad Raffensperger said the state’s own post-election audits point in one direction. In the recent primary election, more than 99.99% of ballots showed no discrepancies. Out of more than 2 million ballots, 159 showed errors, and 143 of those came from hand-marked paper ballots. He said voting machines have performed better than hand-marked paper ballots in those reviews.
That puts him at odds with some activist groups that say hand-marked paper ballots could be the answer. Raffensperger said the trouble with that approach is that voter intent can be unclear, marks can be incomplete, and a person has to make the call. In his view, that makes the audit trail less reliable, not more.
The deadline now hanging over Georgia comes from the rule itself: QR codes on printed ballots cannot be used for vote tabulation after July 1. Lawmakers will have to decide whether the replacement is a different technical method, a change in how printed ballots are read, or some other fix that can be put in place quickly enough to keep the process running.
The issue is bigger than the code on the page. It is about whether Georgia can move away from a tabulation method that is about to be barred without creating new doubts about accuracy, speed, or who can verify the count. The special session next week is the first real test of whether lawmakers can agree on a substitute before the deadline closes in.
