Special legislative sessions are supposed to resolve urgent problems. Georgia’s latest special session instead postponed one deadline, created new statutory conflicts, and left county election officials, the State Election Board, and perhaps the courts to resolve questions the General Assembly should have definitively answered regarding the continued use of QR codes as official votes.
That is not how responsible public policy is made.
The legislature convened because Georgia faced an impossible July 1 deadline to replace its statewide voting system. Lawmakers promised certainty before the 2026 election cycle. Instead, they produced legislation that left many of the underlying legal and operational issues unresolved while introducing new contradictions that now must be addressed under the pressure of an approaching election.
The most obvious example is the widely reported “QR code fix.” The QR codes are still unlawful to use in the upcoming November election.
Many Georgians understandably came away believing the legislature legalized continued QR-code votes. That was the messaging, but not the fact.
The new law delays until 2028 the requirement that Georgia replace its current touchscreen voting system with another touchscreen system that would tabulate the ballot text through optical character recognition instead of reading QR codes. The broader legal issue of ongoing legal non-compliance in using QR codes did not change. (There are five remaining applicable laws on the books that require human readable votes, not QR codes.)
The legislation left untouched numerous provisions of law that require human readable official votes, –ones that voters may verify before the ballot is cast. It also did not resolve ongoing questions involving ballot secrecy, infeasible testing requirements, or how counties are expected to do the impossible — meet all of those legal obligations using the non-compliant current system.
In other words, the legislature moved one deadline while leaving well known multiple larger compliance issues largely where they were before the special session began.
The recount debate provides another example of how the debate became disconnected from the policy outcome.
The Pointless Recount Debate
For days, lawmakers wasted substantial time to debating manual recounts. Yet the principal practical change is exceedingly minimal. For a limited category of statewide offices, when the margin is less than 1/2%, a recount now becomes automatic instead of depending upon a candidate to request one. That circumstance of a losing statewide candidate forgetting to request a recount is quite remote. (The lawmakers did not seem to know that Georgia law has long required that all recounts be manual counts, despite the improper ongoing practice of conducting machine recounts.)
Meanwhile, the recklessly drafted legislation contains language stating that the vote margin between the winner and runner-up in certain statewide races shall not exceed one-half of one percent. Read literally, the statute would prohibit comfortable victories.
Whether that language is ultimately corrected by the General Assembly or interpreted by the courts is almost beside the point. The episode illustrates what can happen when complicated election legislation is drafted, negotiated, and enacted on an accelerated timetable without sufficient opportunity to reconcile language before final passage, or permit both parties and the public to review the proposed legislation.
Future Voting System Conflicting Direction
Another deeply concerning issue received comparatively little attention.
The legislation instructs a newly created committee to develop recommendations for a hand-marked paper ballot system. (Republicans structured the committee refusing to give Democrats an official seat at the table, which got a lot of discussion.) Simultaneously, and in direct conflict, other provisions of the new law continue to require that the state’s replacement voting system be another touchscreen BMD system apparently geared toward a single source vendor (and not a hand marked system the committee is required to recommend.) This was not an oversight. We brought this conflict to the attention of key decision makers before the bill was heard in the House and the Senate, and the known direct conflict (and single source vendor direction) was allowed to stand.
How Will November Elections be Conducted?
County officials must prepare to conduct November elections while navigating unresolved statutory questions of the use of QR codes or the backup system. The State Election Board must determine what rules, guidance, or enforcement actions are necessary to administer laws to direct legal compliance given the touchscreen system cannot comply with law. If administrative action proves insufficient, the judiciary may once again be asked to reconcile statutes that the legislature had every opportunity to harmonize before adjournment.
The General Assembly should not have punted. They should have been clear with the counties and the State Election Board that they will support the Board’s law enforcement and rulemaking activities that must now follow to address the legal compliance issues, requiring backup balloting system use.
Now the work under compressed time deadlines shifts to the controversial State Election Board and the local county election boards. It is imperative the two standing committees of the General Assembly charged with oversight of State Election Board rulemaking actively engage on a bi-partisan basis with the State Election Board to offer guidance to ensure that legislative intent is properly incorporated as those boards work to deal with the problems the General Assembly left unresolved.
The author is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a non-partisan non-profit organization focused on election integrity.
