An election worker in Gwinnett County demonstrates how to insert a voter card into ballot-marking devices used by voters across Georgia. Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder
Ahead of the momentous 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s state leaders faced a choice.
The state’s voting system prior to that year consisted of 27,000 electronic voting machines that had been in use since 2002, which were reaching the end of their life and needed to be replaced.
The voting machines, officially called direct-recording electronic voting machines, worked by capturing an electronic record of voters’ selections. At their polling place, voters received an activated voter card, which they inserted into a machine and used to make their selections. Once the voter had finished casting their ballot, the card was returned to a poll worker and its memory was wiped clean to be used for the next voter. Voters’ selections were saved electronically to a memory card on the machine, which was later collected by a poll worker and sent to election headquarters to be counted.
Cybersecurity experts had long voiced concerns about the electronic voting machines, which were once used by more than 40% of American voters, but in Georgia, lacked any sort of paper trail that could be used to verify election results after the fact. Additionally, the memory cards were vulnerable to viruses and other computer malfunctions.
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Legislators at the time voted for Georgia’s new election system largely along party lines, with Democrats largely favoring hand-marked paper ballots that require voters to fill out ballots with pencils or pens, and Republicans supporting ballot-marking devices, which still required voters to make selections on a machine but produced a paper ballot that would be scanned to tabulate the results. The new machines, purchased for $107 million and manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, were used statewide in Georgia for the first time during the 2020 election.
But nearly six years later, Democrats and Republicans have seemingly found themselves on opposite ends of a similar debate. Some GOP lawmakers are now leading a push to replace ballot-marking devices with hand-marked paper ballots, and there are Democrats who are cautioning against abandoning Georgia’s current ballot-marking device system before the end of the state’s 10-year contract in 2029.
Now, with the 2026 midterm elections looming, lawmakers are once again faced with the question of whether to switch voting systems ahead of key statewide races — and they are running out of time to decide.
‘A very expensive pen with a mind of its own’
In the landscape of America’s election technology, Georgia is an outlier in a few ways. Ballot-marking devices are available in most parts of the U.S. — even in places that rely primarily on hand-marked paper ballots, federal law stipulates that all precincts have voting machines that can accommodate voters with disabilities — but Georgia is one of the few places where voters primarily rely on ballot-marking devices. And while most states use a patchwork of different election systems, Georgia settled on one type of equipment to use statewide.
Georgia’s current ballot-marking devices work by having voters select their choices on an electronic touchscreen, which prompts them to print out a paper ballot when they are finished making their selections. Voters then feed the paper ballot into a separate machine that tabulates the election results based on a QR code.
Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that tracks voting equipment across the U.S., recommends that most voters use hand-marked paper ballots counted by machines, which they see as having the fewest risks and ensure that election officials can verify the outcome of an election after the fact.
“A ballot-marking device is basically a very expensive pen with a mind of its own,” said Mark Lindeman, Verified Voting’s policy and strategy director. Though he said Georgia’s switch to ballot-marking devices in 2019 was an improvement, he added that the machines “will not necessarily do what you tell it to do, so that introduces some complexities and some opportunities for things to go wrong that we would advise minimizing.”
However, he acknowledged that there are times when it makes sense for voters to use ballot-marking devices, particularly when it comes to increasing accessibility.
“We firmly believe that ballot-marking devices should be available for voters who need or prefer to use them,” Lindeman said. “We’re not talking about banning the BMDs, but we’re talking about offering in-person voters the opportunity to hand-mark their paper ballots, and we think that’s a better choice for most voters.”
A partisan flip-flop
When Georgia lawmakers advanced a bill to switch from electronic voting machines to ballot-marking devices in 2019, the legislation, House Bill 316, passed through both chambers largely along party lines.
“House Bill 316 will bring our state to the forefront of election technology,” state Rep. Barry Fleming, a Harlem Republican and lead sponsor of the bill, said at the time. “It builds on the successes of our old system and incorporates the best practices of the modern day.”
Democrats largely opposed the move, arguing that implementing the voting machines was estimated to be five times more expensive than a hand-marked paper ballot system, and would be more vulnerable to hacking and tampering, which could endanger election integrity across the state.
But partisan perceptions of voting equipment began to shift in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race, when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him in Georgia and several other swing states.
Dominion Voting Systems, which has since been acquired by Liberty Vote, became caught up in false claims about the validity of the 2020 election results, with conservative media outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network accusing the company of rigging the election in favor of former President Joe Biden. Trump-aligned attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell also claimed that Liberty Vote had conspired to switch votes in Biden’s favor.
Liberty Vote has since received millions of dollars in settlements after filing a series of lawsuits against those who claimed the company conspired to rig the 2020 election.
But in Georgia, the claims have fueled distrust in ballot-marking devices among some voters. Groups of conservative election integrity activists have spent years urging lawmakers and the State Election Board to abandon ballot-marking devices in favor of hand-marked paper ballots.
Other groups have been pushing for hand-marked ballots for even longer, with a group called the Coalition for Good Governance filing a lawsuit against the state in 2017 to try and force a switch to hand-marked paper ballots ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Marilyn Marks, the Coalition for Good Governance’s executive director, said that if a ballot-marking device were hacked during an election, it would be difficult to trace the breach back to its source.
“If you’ve got a problem with the ballot-marking devices, you have no real record of what the voter entered into the touchscreen, so you will never know what exactly went wrong,” she said, arguing that a hand-marked paper ballot system would eliminate that risk.
“Now [the voter] could have made a mistake, they could have voted for the wrong candidate, but that would have been their fault,” she added.
State Sen. Sam Watson, a Moultrie Republican who served as one of the cosponsors of the 2019 voting machine measure, said he has received requests from constituents to consider a hand-marked paper ballot system.
Watson, who now leads the Senate committee that handles election bills, is also a cosponsor of Senate Bill 214, which would make hand-marked paper ballots the primary voting system across the state.
“Obviously there was a lot that we did not know then,” he said of the switch to ballot-marking devices. The 2020 election was also an unusual time in Georgia history, with record numbers of voters using absentee ballots due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a different day, a different time,” Watson added. “Everything’s changed since then.”
The bill, introduced earlier this year by state Sen. Max Burns, would require the state to purchase new equipment, including on-demand ballot printers to dispense the ballots to voters and optical scanning systems to tabulate them.
“You can’t hack a paper ballot,” said Burns, a Sylvania Republican, during a March committee meeting. “You can’t alter a paper ballot. At the end of the day, you have the physical document. You have the physical vote that was cast by the elector, and you can verify [the results].”
Burns’ bill passed through the Senate near the end of the 2025 legislative session with a party-line vote. It remains alive, and could be considered by the House when the Legislature reconvenes in January. Burns did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
But Democrats, who favored a hand-marked paper ballot system in 2019, have criticized Republicans’ push to switch voting systems again before the end of Georgia’s contract with Liberty Vote. The state is currently slated to begin bidding on new voting systems in 2028.
Sen. Sally Harrell, an Atlanta Democrat, said she would support a switch to paper ballots, but noted that the current ballot-marking devices were purchased on a 20-year bond, meaning that the Legislature will continue covering the cost of those machines until the 2040 fiscal year, regardless of what voting equipment is in use.
“We, unfortunately, are still paying for those machines,” she said. “That doesn’t seem fiscally responsible.”
State Rep. Jasmine Clark, a Lilburn Democrat who is running for Congress in 2026, said she preferred paper ballots, but cautioned against switching voting systems right before a high-profile election like the 2026 midterms.
“Every time we change something, you now introduce another layer of insecurity,” Clark said, adding, “I think it’s tough to sell something super brand new in a major election, like the election for all of the statewide offices in Georgia.”
Travis Doss, the executive director of the Richmond County Board of Elections and former president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, expressed concern about how counties would pay for election changes implemented by the Legislature.
“Funding is a huge concern,” he said, adding that though the state is responsible for paying for voting equipment, the cost of ballot paper, printer ink and other consumables are shouldered by county elections offices.
“That would be a huge expense on the counties,” he said.
Doss also worries about the feasibility of implementing new equipment on a short timeline. When Georgia switched to ballot-marking devices in 2019, he said, the transition was a difficult one for election officials.
“We had to be ready to go by March of 2020 — which, of course, we had the three weeks of advanced voting, so we really had to be ready to go by mid-February,” he said. “So there was a lot of hurrying and scrambling and whatnot to make sure that everything was ready for when we had to start voting.”
If Georgia were to completely switch systems again, he said, elections administrators would need a minimum of six months to comfortably implement the new technology. Under that timeline, any changes to Georgia’s voting equipment would need to be finalized by mid-April.
“Not only do we as the elections directors have to be trained on the equipment,” he said, “Then we have to turn around and be able to train staff and poll workers as well.”
2025 legislative updates
Regardless of whether Georgia switches voting systems this year, lawmakers may be forced to update certain recently enacted election laws before the end of the 2026 session.
Under Senate Bill 189, which was signed into law in 2024, QR codes can no longer be used to tabulate ballots after next July. The QR codes have faced criticism from cybersecurity experts and proponents of hand-marked paper ballots, who say that ballots should be counted based on text that can be deciphered by humans.
“None of us can read the QR code,” Marks from the Coalition for Good Governance said. “The machines tabulate those QR code votes, so we have no way of actually knowing who we are voting for.”
During the 2025 legislative session, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger estimated that updating all the necessary equipment to implement that change will require roughly $66 million in state funds, more than double the $32.5 million estimate that was floated when lawmakers considered the proposal in 2023. The money would be used to fund the purchase of 33,000 new ballot printers, along with new optical scanners and updated memory cards needed to tabulate ballots with human-readable text.
However, lawmakers failed to appropriate the funds before the Legislature adjourned in April.
During the 2025 session, Raffensperger also urged state leaders to prioritize software upgrades in the short term, which he says are more cost-effective than spending millions of dollars in new equipment that may be replaced soon after the 2026 election.
“In two years, this system’s contract with [Liberty Vote] is up,” he told House lawmakers during a committee meeting in February. “At that point you can then consider, what do we want to do? What does the future system look like?”
Secretary of state spokesperson Robert Sinners said the office would follow the laws put in place by the Legislature, but that Raffensperger maintains his confidence in Georgia’s current election equipment.
“The secretary has been firm on his commitment to Georgia’s voting system,” Sinners said.
And though a loyal contingent of activists has continued to lobby for an immediate switch to paper ballots, other Georgia residents are less convinced that changing voting equipment is necessary.
A May poll by the Democracy Defense Project, a nonprofit aimed at countering election misinformation, found that nearly four in five Georgia voters who cast ballots in the 2024 general election had moderate or high levels of trust in the integrity of Georgia’s elections ahead of 2026. Additionally, only 27% of those surveyed said they support a switch to paper ballots, while 43% opposed the change.
Georgia voters also expressed skepticism about a switch to paper ballots. Laura Dunn, a 27-year-old Fulton County resident, said she had concerns about voter suppression under a hand-marked paper ballot system.
“If we have a system that’s working effectively for people, and counting votes and making it as easy as possible for everybody and transparent, we don’t need to go back to something like that,” she said.
Daniel Harmon, a 54-year-old Gwinnett County voter, also expressed skepticism about changing Georgia’s voting equipment.
“That’s stupid,” he said when asked about a potential switch to hand-marked paper ballots. “I understand the concern about fraud, but there hasn’t really been any fraud, so it just slows down the process a lot.”
Raffensperger has also praised the accuracy of Georgia’s current system, which includes audits of all the human-readable text to ensure that it matches the QR-code tabulated votes for every race on the ballot. Out of 87 discrepancies found during the 2024 audit, he added, 86 were on hand-marked absentee ballots.
The issue of switching to hand-marked paper ballots has also been a central part of a House “blue-ribbon” committee dedicated to examining Georgia’s election policies. The committee, which is expected to provide policy recommendations ahead of the 2026 legislative session, is headed by Rep. Tim Fleming, a Covington Republican who is running for secretary of state.
Lindeman of Verified Voting, who provided testimony to the committee during a September meeting, said that the debate about changing voting equipment in Georgia may come down to a matter of timing.
“The question for Georgia or any state, is not whether to change voting systems, but when to change voting systems,” Lindeman said in an interview. “Because the systems age out, you need to replace them sooner or later. And Georgia is heading towards the end of its contract with Liberty Vote, so it naturally comes to a decision point.”
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