ATLANTA — A proposal for a quick switch to hand-marked paper ballots cleared the Georgia Senate on Friday, an idea that election officials say would disrupt this year’s elections.
The Senate’s 32-21 party-line vote sets up a showdown over competing bills that would change Georgia’s voting system. The Senate bill would take effect this summer, while a House proposal would delay the transition until the 2028 election year.
The measure that advanced Friday would require voters to fill out ballots by bubbling in ovals instead of making their choices on touchscreens. Millions of ballots would need to be preprinted and stored until voters fill them out.
Immediately replacing Georgia’s statewide voting system would be “irresponsible and unrealistic,” said Joseph Kirk, president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials.
“It’s just not enough time” for training, testing, and implementation, Kirk said. “You don’t want to do it for the first time in a Georgia 2026 gubernatorial election, when we’re going to have lines and have a bunch of folks there. That’s a really heavy lift.”
The bill follows a state law legislators passed two years ago that set a deadline to remove computer QR codes from ballots by July 1 of this year. Critics of Georgia’s election system say voters can’t read QR codes to verify that their ballots accurately reflect their choices.
The House’s proposal would move that deadline until 2028, before voters decide on the next U.S. president.
Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, said now is the time to change to hand-marked paper ballots.
Hand-marked ballots are the main election day voting method in two-thirds of the United States, according to the election technology organization Verified Voting.
“Democrats tell you on one hand we should move to paper ballots. But now that we’re trying to do it, it’s a threat to democracy: Bloody Sunday, voter suppression, Donald Trump,” Dolezal said. “All that we’re asking is for Georgians … to vote the way that the vast majority of people in America vote.”
Critics of Georgia’s elections, including election security advocates and Republicans disillusioned by Trump’s loss in 2020, say Georgia’s touchscreen voting system is untrustworthy and insecure.
But election officials and Democrats say Georgia’s elections are accurate, and allegations of widespread fraud have never been proved.
Sen. Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, said the bill’s requirement to print so many ballots before elections introduces new problems.
“We have built in all kinds of opportunities for human error, let alone the major security risks and concerns that I have when you have thousands and thousands of preprinted ballots sitting in someone’s fellowship hall,” Jackson said. “Georgia is moving in a direction of changing our system because there has been so much doubt seeded into our system, even though we’ve proven that they are safe and secure.”
Under the competing bill in the House, the state would purchase new ballot-on-demand printers that would create ballots when voters arrive rather than require blank ballots in advance.
The Senate bill also includes new provisions that would fine county governments $100 for each voter registration they fail to cancel after receiving information those voters might have moved away, require election officials to post the names of all voters by midnight on election day, and mandate recounts by hand.
Senators previously voted down a similar version of their elections bill earlier this year, but Republicans mustered enough votes Friday to override Democratic opposition.
With just two business days left before this year’s legislative session ends, Georgia lawmakers will need to decide how to resolve their difference.
The House could consider the bill that passed the Senate on Friday, House Bill 960. Or the House could move forward with its legislation, Senate Bill 214, that would replace Georgia’s voting system before the 2028 election.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat, an initiative of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.