Ten weeks before a state-mandated deadline, Georgia’s legislature adjourned this spring without a plan, and without a dollar, to solve a problem it created for itself: a 2024 law banning QR codes from vote tabulation, set to take effect July 1, 2026. Rather than scramble a fix before the November midterms, lawmakers passed legislation in late June delaying any change until 2028, meaning the state’s roughly 159 counties will use the same QR-code-reliant machines that triggered the controversy in the first place.
The dispute is less about partisanship than about arithmetic and logistics, though it has plenty of political undertones. It offers a case study in what happens when a legislature bans a technology before anyone has funded, designed, or tested its replacement.
How Georgia Got Here
Georgia rolled out touchscreen ballot-marking devices statewide before the 2020 election, adopting machines from Dominion Voting Systems after a 2019 federal court ruling barred the state’s old paperless touchscreen system. The Dominion machines, now sold under the rebranded name Liberty Vote after a corporate acquisition, print a paper ballot showing a voter’s choices in plain English alongside a QR code. But scanners at the tabulation stage read only the QR code, not the human-readable text, a design choice that has drawn complaints from both parties since voters cannot independently verify what the code actually encodes.
Those concerns gained political momentum on the right after the 2020 election, feeding into broader disputes over Georgia’s results. In 2024, the Republican-controlled General Assembly responded by passing a law banning QR codes in tabulation, effective July 1, 2026. It was a decisive statement. It also came with no appropriated funding and no technical roadmap for what would replace the system.
A Bill With No Budget
By the time this year’s legislative session ended in early April, lawmakers had still not funded a fix, according to reporting by Votebeat. Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer in Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office and a Republican candidate to succeed him, put a price tag on the state’s options: roughly $25 million to $26 million to modify the existing system so scanners read printed text instead of QR codes, or as much as $300 million to replace the voting system outright. The legislature appropriated neither figure. Sterling called the QR code ban itself “a solution in search of a problem” and warned that meeting the original deadline was “impossible” given the timeline lawmakers had set.
Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper was blunter about the legislature’s inaction, saying lawmakers had “abdicated their responsibility.” House Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Victor Anderson, a Republican, had floated a compromise allowing counties to keep the current system through the 2026 election cycle, a preview of the delay lawmakers ultimately chose.
Election Officials Sound the Alarm
County election administrators, who would have had to execute any changeover, were especially vocal about the risk of rushing a new system into place months before a midterm election. Joseph Kirk, election supervisor in Bartow County and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, put it plainly: “We shouldn’t plan to have an emergency in November.” Fulton County Elections Director Nadine Williams offered a concrete illustration of the fallback option’s cost in labor: hand-counting just one contest in 2020 required roughly 275 two-person teams working four to five days.
Those numbers underscore why full manual tabulation is not treated as a realistic statewide alternative, even by critics of the QR code system, and why a mid-cycle equipment swap worried officials tasked with actually running polling places.
Kemp’s Special Session and the Delay to 2028
Facing the looming July 1 deadline, Governor Brian Kemp called a special legislative session that took up the issue directly. House Speaker Jon Burns signaled Republican leadership’s willingness to negotiate with the governor’s office on a path forward. The result, passed in late June, pushed any mandated change to the tabulation system back to 2028, aligning it with the next presidential election cycle rather than forcing a fix ahead of this year’s midterms.
Two Views of the Same Delay
Supporters of the delay, including Sterling’s office, frame it as pragmatic risk management: better to run a known, tested system for one more election cycle than to introduce new hardware or software with only months of lead time. Critics counter that the legislature is simply re-running the same failure mode, having already had two years since the original ban passed to plan and budget for a replacement, and that a second delay signals the QR code concerns were never urgent enough to fund in the first place. Draper’s criticism reflects that latter view: the abdication, in her telling, is not the delay itself but the two years of inaction that made it necessary.
What Comes Next
For now, Georgia’s 159 counties will use the same Liberty Vote machines and QR code tabulation process in November 2026 that have been the subject of years of litigation and legislative wrangling, including a long-running federal case over the machines’ security that has already gone to trial. The 2028 deadline gives the legislature roughly two more years to decide between the cheaper modification, the costlier full replacement, or another delay. Whether lawmakers use that window to appropriate real money, or arrive at the next deadline just as unprepared, will be one of the more concrete tests of whether election administration in Georgia can keep pace with the laws written to govern it.
