The Georgia General Assembly will convene its special legislative session next week to redraw district maps and decide voting legislation.
When lawmakers convene the special session, they will need to find a solution for a looming July 1 deadline that says that QR codes on the printed ballots can no longer be used to tabulate votes.
Some activist groups say hand marked paper ballots could be the solution. But Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that when the state conducts its post-election audits, voting machines fare better than hand-marked paper ballots.
“The overwhelming majority of errors identified in our election review and audits have occurred with hand-marked paper ballots where voter intent can be unclear, marks can be incomplete, and human interpretation is necessary,” he said.
Raffensperger said that in the recent primary election, more than 99.99% of ballots showed no discrepancies. Out of over 2 million ballots, 159 showed errors, and 143 of those came from hand-marked paper ballots, he said.
This story comes to The Current GA through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a non-profit newsroom covering the state of Georgia.
