How the Georgia legislature left counties with no way to run the 2026 election

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/