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When Georgia lawmakers went home on Friday, they left the state on a collision course with their own self-imposed deadline to change the way residents vote.

In 2024, they banned the use of QR codes to tally election results starting July 1. Despite lengthy hearings on the problem before the legislative session last year and during it this winter, they walked away without establishing a replacement system.

Election officials are equipped to use hand-marked ballots instead, but they say that system is only for isolated emergencies and they question the reliability for statewide use during the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

“We shouldn’t plan to have an emergency in November,” said Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County and the president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration & Election Officials.

Beyond the logistics, the use of the backup system outside of an emergency may not be legal.

State law says election officials must let voters use an electronic ballot-marking system like the one in use now unless conditions make that “impossible” or “impracticable.”

The Legislature has not defined those words, but election officials have been interpreting them to mean situations like a power outage or a computer bootup failure.

The State Election Board, which interprets election-related law, considered amending its rules in a way that would have effectively allowed the paper-based backup systems to be used in other kinds of emergencies, like a legal one.

Critics, including President Donald Trump, contend Georgia’s voting system violates federal and state law.

Reasons range from lack of required secrecy — the touchscreen kiosks voters use to enter their selections are barely private — to the inability of voters to confirm that their vote was accurately recorded by the “Quick Response” (QR) code on the ballot they turn in after making their selections.

The computer system spits out a record of the vote on paper, in human readable text as required by law. But the system relies on an included translation into a machine-readable data format — the QR code — to tabulate the official tally.

The state election board declined to write a definition of “impossible” or “impracticable” into its rules.  During a vote in December, the members tied 2-2, with two Republicans in favor and a Democrat and a Republican opposed. The Republican who voted against the measure said it was the Legislature’s duty to define the words it had written into law.

With the legislative session over, it is too late for lawmakers to do that before this year’s midterm elections, unless Gov. Brian Kemp calls them back to the Capitol for a special session.

But lawmakers failed to address the issue during their legislative session last year and during the three months that they were in Atlanta this year.

“If they couldn’t do it in two years, how are they going to do it in a few weeks? I have no confidence left in the legislators that are trying to decide what to do with elections,” said Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County.

She said she is worried about the midterms like never before in her 18-year career.

The current computerized system automatically deals with a logistical headache in polling places where people converge from different neighborhoods represented by different combinations of districts for city council, county commission, school board, the Legislature and Congress.

There are 90 ballot “styles” in Cherokee alone, she said, with as many as five at one of her precincts.

Dover said her biggest fear is that a poll worker accidentally gives a voter the wrong paper ballot. She said the odds of that go up as her veteran poll workers, many in their mid-70s, throw up their hands and say they are done with the job due to the uncertainty and risk. She said some have expressed concern about prosecution by a State Election Board that has become more zealous about election integrity since Trump lost the presidency in 2020.

The prospect of November “is a little bit frightening,” Dover said.

Marilyn Marks, one of the many advocates for the use of hand-marked paper ballots, said such fears are overblown.

Marks is sympathetic with election officials’ concerns about being blamed for screwing up an election conducted with hand-marked paper ballots, but she said the bigger risk is that Trump uses questions about the legality of Georgia’s current system to seize voting machines after the November elections.

They would get blamed for issuing the wrong ballot, acknowledged Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, adding that they think they would be held blameless if the computerized system they were directed to use were deemed to be illegal.

“That’s kind of looking at things a little too myopically,” she said. 

Marks said poll workers are already trained to pivot to paper in an emergency, so it is not a stretch to imagine them pulling off an entire election without the computerized voting machines. Election directors would just have to pre-print ballots and get them organized, she said. Counties with more ballot styles could also use on-demand printers, she added.

About 4 million Georgians voted in the last midterm elections, in November 2022.

“I have a lot of concerns about how heavy this lift is going to be for us,” said Kirk, the leader of the association for elections officials.

He said he has implemented new voting systems many times in his career. It takes a year to do it right, he said, and he and his colleagues will have less than half a year after the primary runoff elections in June.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do our absolute best to try and serve our communities,” he said.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger oversees elections in Georgia.

He told lawmakers it would cost about $66 million to swap out election systems with three years remaining under the contract with the current vendor.

Some lawmakers said that was an exaggerated amount, and the General Assembly did not put it in the budget.

Even so, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said Raffensperger, who will appear on May 19 Republican primary election ballots as a candidate for governor, is confident that the state is ready for November.

“Georgia’s election directors will be ready to run an election, period,” the spokesman said in a text message.

The spokesman did not elaborate on why the office was so sanguine, but in November Raffensperger wrote a letter to the two state representatives leading a Blue Ribbon study committee on election procedures.

Raffensperger wrote that his office had successfully conducted a pilot program authorized by the Legislature to use optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to tally votes. The “double blind” count of the human-readable ballot printouts from the electronic ballot-marking devices produced 100% accurate results, Raffensperger told them.

In other words, the OCR count had matched the QR count.

Raffensperger concluded that the General Assembly should authorize and fund this method as a way around the 2024 ban, since that law only made the use of QR codes illegal for tabulation of the official vote. He said it would only cost $300,000 “and would save taxpayers $60 million or more for the cost of new system components.”

So, the Legislature left a loophole in 2024, and if the state opts to use it, voters will not notice anything different when they go to the polls in November.