Georgia’s voting systems have been the subject of endless political controversies, lawsuits, and conspiracy theories. In 2024, Georgia’s legislature passed a bill that would prohibit use of the state’s current machines by 2026. But after two years and no plan for a replacement system, the legislature acted this year to extend the deadline until after the midterm elections.
All of this may be leaving Georgia’s voters unsure about how they will cast their ballot this year. Here’s what to know about Georgia’s voting systems and the safeguards that protect your vote.
How Georgia’s Voting Systems Work
In 2019, Georgia phased out its outdated, paperless voting systems. These systems — known as direct recording electronic systems — were touchscreen machines that stored votes as digital records directly on the system itself. Security experts had long warned that paperless systems like Georgia’s were less secure and reliable because there was no independent paper record of votes — because there was only a digital record, voters could not double check that their selections were accurate before they cast their ballot, and election officials could not double check that the electronic system correctly read and recorded the votes to reach an accurate total. While there is no evidence that a cyberattack ever altered any votes in a Georgia election, the paperless systems created an unnecessary vulnerability and failed to provide trustworthy evidence of a secure and accurate election.
Because of these concerns, Georgia replaced its direct recording electronic systems with a new paper-based system ahead of the 2020 elections. Voters still mark their selections using a touchscreen system, but the machines — known as ballot-marking devices — now print out a paper ballot with the voters’ choices written alongside a QR code with the selections encoded in it. After the voter reviews the paper ballot and confirms it accurately reflects their choices, they then insert the ballot into a scanner to be counted. The paper record is stored for future audits to verify the election outcome and that the scanners worked as intended.
Ballot-marking devices with QR codes, like those used in Georgia, are also used by voters in nearly 2,000 counties across 40 states. In most cases, ballot-marking devices are used in these counties as accessible voting systems that allow voters with disabilities who cannot hand-mark a ballot to vote independently and privately, as federal law requires. But Delaware, Nevada, and South Carolina, like Georgia, use ballot-marking devices for all voters.
What’s Next for Georgia’s Voting Systems?
In 2024, Georgia’s state legislature passed a law that prohibited voting systems that use QR codes (including the state’s current ballot-marking devices). The law set a deadline of July 2026 for the secretary of state and county election officials to implement compliant systems.
But in the two years after the prohibition was passed, the state legislature failed to provide any funding for election officials to upgrade or replace their voting systems so they could meet state law requirements. The legislature also refused to specify exactly what kind of voting system should replace the ballot-marking devices with QR codes, leaving behind other limiting and even contradictory requirements in state law that left election officials with few, if any, options.
In June 2026, just weeks before the deadline for new voting systems, the legislature met in a special session and passed a new law to extend the deadline for phasing out the ballot-marking devices with QR codes until 2028. The same law also created an Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee to consider and make recommendations for how Georgia should transition from its current voting system to a system where most voters hand-mark their ballots at the polling place. The law directs the members of the committee — who were appointed by the governor and state legislative leaders — to release a report with recommendations by January 31, 2027.
What to Know for the 2026 Election
With this extension and plan for next steps in place, Georgia’s voters will continue to cast their ballots on the familiar ballot-marking devices for the 2026 midterm elections. Here’s what voters should know.
Georgia has safeguards in place to protect the security and accuracy of your vote.
Georgia’s voting systems are certified to federal and state standards for security and accessibility. They are tested both before and after voters cast ballots to ensure they are working as intended.
Because the systems have a paper record of every vote cast, election officials can conduct audits after the election to verify accuracy. Since 2020, Georgia has required risk-limiting audits, where election workers review a sample of ballots by hand, examining the human-readable text on the paper records to confirm that the outcome was correctly determined by the voting machines. With risk-limiting audits, the size of the sample to be reviewed depends on how tight the margin of victory is, increasing when margins are closer — in 2020 when the presidential election was razor-thin, Georgia election officials conducted a full hand count of every ballot and confirmed that the outcome was correctly determined.
Notably, this year’s new law does not change the state’s use of risk-limiting audits, nor does it modify the specific procedures in place for local election superintendents to complete the audits prior to final certification of contests. The law instead only changes the number of races subject to the audits, which for this fall includes those for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. Additionally, one statewide office — either state school superintendent, insurance and fire safety commissioner, agriculture commissioner, labor commissioner, supreme court justice, or public service commissioner (for districts 3 and 5) — will be selected for audit by majority vote by the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the house, senate minority leader, and house minority leader on the Thursday after Election Day.
As has been the case since 2020, the secretary of state oversees the entire process, including setting forth instructions for how local election superintendents must conduct the audit.
Separate from its post-election audits, Georgia has backups available in case the ballot-marking devices are not working on election day or during the early voting period. Election officials provide polling places with a supply of pre-printed ballots that voters can hand-mark until the machines are up and running again. These ballots can be inserted into the scanner just like the ballots printed by ballot-marking devices.
