(The Center Square) – The Georgia General Assembly seemed ready to pass one bill that would change the state’s elections but in the end, lawmakers said “sine die” early Friday morning without reaching an agreement.
A bill that would require Georgia to have a new voting system by the 2028 presidential primary passed the House but did not get a Senate vote.
Senate Bill 214 would have taken the pressure off election officials trying to implement Senate Bill 189, passed in 2024, which prohibited QR codes on ballots. That bill would have taken effect on July 1, before the November 2026 election.
Rep. Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, who chaired a House study committee on elections, said the committee realized the timeline could not be met.
The bill introduced on-demand printing and hand-marked paper ballots, but did not mandate them for the future voting system.
“The presumptive model here is the ballot on-demand system, but we are not limited to that,” Anderson said.
The bill would have also changed the recount provision to require automatic recounts if there is a 1% difference in the results, a change from the current 0.5%, effective July 1. The authority to conduct the optical character recognition audit would have moved from the Secretary of State to the State Election Board.
Lilburn Democrat Saira Draper, who was on the study committee, said during the House debate that the bill is an example of how all legislation should be approached.
“It was a bipartisan solution, and importantly, it also took into consideration of the voters, of the counties that have to implement our elections and the election officials,” Draper said.
Senate Bill 214 was supported by the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials. The State Election Board passed a unanimous resolution asking the state to move to hand-marked ballots “as soon as practicable” after member Salleigh Grubbs criticized the bill, saying it would not remove the state’s legal obligation to remove QR codes.
“We should not take comfort that this idea has been deferred. It is not,” Grubbs said at the March 18 board meeting. “Georgia remains out of compliance and the responsibility to correct that does not wait for a future deadline.”
The Senate passed a bill that would have required hand-marked ballots for the November election, but it wasn’t taken up by the House.
The General Assembly’s lack of action leaves unanswered questions as to how the state’s elections will run after July 1 when Senate Bill 189 takes effect.