Senate moves forward on elections bill

State Senators took advantage of a rare Saturday session to move forward with an elections bill – even making a change that requires manual hand counts of ballots before elections can be certified. This came as lawmakers are working through a called legislative session.

Elections were on the agenda for the called session as lawmakers were tasked with working to address the issue of the use of QR codes on ballots and a deadline to stop using them to count votes this summer, but no new system is in place. However, on Saturday, Senate Republicans amended a bill that would push the deadline back to 2028 to include hand recounts of the two top races on ballots.