ATLANTA — The clock is ticking for Georgia to change how it counts votes to comply with a law passed by the General Assembly.
That law, SB 189, requires the state to stop using QR codes to count ballots by July 2026, before the November General election.
Instead, the Georgia Secretary of State wants to do two counts, and they tested it statewide this past election.
The SOS plan would still use QR codes to get fast results on election night, but then go back and use other optical scanners to read and count the text on the ballots for a second count.
“Those two counts, when compared, is the gold standard of counting. You have two blind counts,” said Matthew Tyser, Georgia’s Deputy Secretary of State.
If Georgia does not use this system, Tyser said Georgia would need to spend more than $60 million on new voting machines. Something he said cannot be put in operation in time for the July 2026 deadline.
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Marc Hyden, senior director of state government affairs at the R Street Institute, said Georgia would be forced to count ballots by hand in order to follow the letter of Georgia’s new election law.
“If you want to know who wins an election before Thanksgiving, this is not for you. And if you have to wait this long to count all the votes, that’s going to undermine confidence in our electoral systems, and we do not want that,” Hyden said.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office instead hopes in January, the General Assembly will be willing to make small changes to the law, to allow them to move forward with the two counts - First, the QR codes for speed, then a second count to meet the requirements of SB 189.
“If there is a difference, we have the ability to go in, take a look, see exactly what occurred,” Tyser said.
The Secretary of State’s Office revealed that of the nearly 1.6 million votes cast in November, 99.999% of the machine-marked, ballots were accurate.
Only two ballots had a discrepancy, and because of the two counts, they were able to figure out what went wrong there.
Raffensperger sent a letter to the General Assembly this month detailing the legal changes that would need to be made for the proposed system to work.