How the Georgia legislature left counties with no way to run the 2026 election [View all]

The 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.

That complaint gained political traction on the right after the 2020 election, and in 2024 the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature passed a law banning the use of QR codes in tabulation starting on July 1, 2026. But the law left the hard questions — what replacement system to use, how to pay for it, and how to transition — unanswered. The legislature was supposed to fill in the gaps this year, but it adjourned earlier this month without doing so.




https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/04/27/georgia-voting-machine-deadline-election-counties-qr-codes-dominion/