Georgia senators took the first step toward abandoning the state’s touchscreen voting system, replacing it with paper ballots filled out by hand.
A bill proposed Tuesday would require almost all Georgia voters to bubble in their choices at polling places instead of using touchscreen computers that print out paper ballots.
The Senate Ethics Committee could vote on the legislation Wednesday, but lawmakers don’t plan to immediately ditch touchscreens. With just more than a week left in this year’s legislative session, senators said final votes on the bill might not be held until 2026.
Voters who supported the idea, many of them conservatives wearing T-shirts reading “Paper Ballots Please,” packed a hearing Tuesday.
“With hand-marked paper ballots, voters can clearly see what they have marked on the ballot and inserted into the tabulator,” Autumn Miller, a Fulton County poll worker, told the committee.
Georgia’s existing election equipment, manufactured by Dominion Voting System, has been used across the state since 2020. Until 2002, when Georgia began using all-electronic voting machines, counties used a variety ballots, from hand-marked paper ballots to lever machines.
Roughly 70% of voters nationwide already use paper ballots filled out by hand, according to the election technology organization Verified Voting.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for elections with paper ballots, fueling his supporters’ efforts to replace the Georgia voting system in use when he narrowly lost the 2020 election.
While lawmakers debated legislation, Trump signed a sweeping executive order aimed at overhauling election processes across the nation. The order requires voters to provide documents proving they are citizens and demands ballots be received by Election Day. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was demonized by Trump after the 2020 election, applauded the order.
Critics of Georgia’s voting system say it inserts a computer between voters and their ballots and obscures votes in computer-readable QR codes, leaving voters uncertain as to whether their ballot will be counted accurately.
But those who oppose switching voting systems say the touchscreens are reliable, easy to use and produce a paper ballot for audits and recounts.
“Adding more rules will never satisfy those who are convinced our elections are not secure and our elections are not accurate,” said Michael Beach, an assistant poll manager from DeKalb County. “There will always be conspiracy theories coming back up about the next system if we don’t stop pandering to them.”
Under the bill, hand-marked paper ballots would become Georgia’s primary voting method, with touchscreens still available for voters with disabilities.
Ballots would be printed on demand at early voting locations to accommodate different races and districts, but they could be preprinted in smaller election day precincts where most voters receive the same ballot.
The cost of switching voting systems wasn’t immediately clear. It would cost millions of dollars to buy on-demand ballot printers for each of Georgia’s 2,600 voting locations.
Georgia spent more than $100 million in 2019 for its current voting equipment.
“It’s outlived its useful life,” said state Sen. Max Burns, a Republican from Sylvania and the sponsor of Senate Bill 214. “This legislation charts a path to move away from an electronic environment that people have concerns about.”
State Sen. Jason Esteves, a Democrat from Atlanta, said he’s concerned voters wouldn’t trust a replacement voting system either.
“I don’t want to be here in two, three, five years from now with conspiracies about ballot on demand,” Esteves said.
