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BumRushDaShow

(169,909 posts) Sat Apr 4, 2026, 06:35 AM 7 hrs ago

Georgia lawmakers end annual session without settling conflict on voting machines

Source: AP

Updated 6:47 PM EDT, April 3, 2026

ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state’s voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground.

The lawmakers’ failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session. “They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature.

Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.

But state law still requires counties to use the machines. No money has been allocated to reprogram them, and lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/georgia-voting-machines-5e3102cf591d28dd8c71c31feb1a6c07

2 replies

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Georgia lawmakers end annual session without settling conflict on voting machines (Original Post) BumRushDaShow 7 hrs ago OP

No machines Whip-poor-will 7 hrs ago #1

Give the voter a printed ballot . . . AverageOldGuy 6 hrs ago #2

Whip-poor-will

(264 posts)

1. No machines

Reply to BumRushDaShow (Original post)

Sat Apr 4, 2026, 07:14 AM

7 hrs ago

German standard

"When electronic voting machines are deployed, it must be possible for the citizen to check the essential steps in the election act and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowledge."

The timing of the results reporting isn't escentual but accuracy that is citizen verifiable is.

AverageOldGuy

(3,869 posts)

2. Give the voter a printed ballot . . .

Reply to BumRushDaShow (Original post)

Sat Apr 4, 2026, 08:06 AM

6 hrs ago

. . . even if it's more than one page long.

The ballot should have the questions or persons being voted on with oval/circle/rectangle/square beside the choices. Voter fills in the circle/oval/etc. with a pen that will not smear. Feed the ballot into a scanner that reads to position of the filled-in oval/circle/whatever and creates a tally from those marks.

This "mark sense" technology has been around since at least the mid-1950's when I filled in circles and squares on test answer sheets in a poor, rural Mississippi county. The technology works and is reliable.

This process -- voter marks a ballot, scanner reads the marks and produces a tally -- results in (1) fast, reliable tallies that are (2) backed up by paper ballots that can be hand-tallied.

Dump the QR codes, the barcodes, or anything else except for hand-marked, machine-tallied paper ballots.

Hand-counting (actually, hand tallying) is notoriously unreliable, requiring recount, double-check, recount, triple-check, recount . . .

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