Leading up to today’s State Election Board rulemaking meeting, for five years now, Georgia’s political leaders have wrestled with an uncomfortable truth they’ve been reluctant to say out loud: the state’s $200 million touchscreen voting system is a lemon. A shiny, expensive lemon—one that was supposed to modernize elections, replace a touchscreen system the federal court declared unconstitutional, and give voters confidence. Instead, it has delivered soaring county election costs, clunky administration, unverifiable results, and unending violations of some of the most basic laws protecting voters’ rights.
Republican lawmakers don’t need me to tell them this. Anyone who has ever stepped inside a Georgia polling place knows exactly what I mean. The touchscreens display every voter’s selections in large bright text visible to anyone nearby. Georgia’s Constitution promises “absolute secrecy” in how each citizen votes, yet these machines practically throw your choices on the Jumbotron. For years, state officials have waved away this glaring violation of law and voters’ privacy.
Worse still, the Secretary of State now admits that he does not intend to comply with the 2024 General Assembly mandate requiring the removal of QR codes from ballots beginning next summer. This wasn’t a suggestion by the lawmakers. It was a mandate. Yet the state’s top election official plans to dodge the plain intent of the law with a proposed “workaround” so strained it would make Rube Goldberg blush, while he keeps using the failure-prone QR code- printing voting contraptions.
Let’s be honest: this isn’t a partisan issue. Federal and state law require that voters be able to read and verify their own recorded votes before casting a ballot. Under Georgia’s touchscreen system, the vote that actually counts—the QR code—is unreadable to voters. They have no way to confirm that the vulnerable touchscreen has recorded their vote correctly, and sometimes it does not. That is not speculation. It has happened in Georgia and other states.
Georgia citizens should not tolerate a system where the voter cannot know who they voted for before they put their ballot in the scanner.
This Wednesday, the State Election Board will vote on a modest but critically important rule that simply defines two words buried for decades in Georgia statute: “impossible” and “impracticable.” When is it “impossible” or “impracticable” to use the touchscreen system? When the system cannot comply with Georgia law. When it cannot protect ballot secrecy. When it cannot allow voters to read or verify their choices. When it cannot meet pre-election testing requirements. When it cannot operate reliably or legally. In other words: in the 2026 elections!
Georgia has always had a backup voting method—hand-marked paper ballots—and it has served this state well for generations. Seventy percent of American voters now use this method because it is simple, secure, auditable, and inexpensive. It requires no complex touchscreen and printer setups for every voting station and the pricey vendor contracts that follow, no armies of technicians, and no faith in a barcode that voters cannot read. A voter marks their paper ballot privately with a black pen. They know exactly who they voted for. The ballot is scanned and tallied in the same scanners used today. The ballot is a permanent, verifiable record that courts and the public can trust, and never have to question what might have happen to the intended vote selected on the touchscreen. Unlike the unconstitutional method of method on often-public displays, the voter marks his vote in secret and can cast his or her ballot without fear of being called on to account for their vote.
Georgia’s touchscreen system has become a Rube Goldberg contraption—with security vulnerabilities, labor-intensive, vendor-dependent, outrageously costly, and legally dubious. Counties are draining their budgets to store, transport, program, secure, power, test, and maintain more than 35,000 touchscreens and 35,000 printers and peripheral equipment, all to produce a ballot the voter cannot even verify contains his desired votes.
The State Election Board’s rule won’t replace the system overnight. But it will finally force officials to confront the question they have avoided for five years: Can Georgia run a lawful election on machines that do not meet basic legal requirements? If the answer is no—and it is—then the law already provides the remedy. The Board and counties must move to hand-marked ballots.
Georgia has suffered through half a decade of elections where the public could not be confident that the declared winners truly won. Adopting this election rule is the first step toward 2026 elections that all Georgians can trust again.
Marilyn Marks is the executive director of non-profit Coalition for Good Governance and a plaintiff in the long-running Curling lawsuit against Secretary Raffensperger and the State Election Board to have the current voting system declared unconstitutional.
