In 2022, Margaret Messerlie went to vote in Houston County, Georgia. She selected her candidates on the machine, which then printed her ballot to be deposited in a scanner to count her vote. But first, having been swayed by conspiracy theories about rampant election fraud related to voting machines, she used a pen to scratch out the Q.R. code on her ballot that the scanner uses to tabulate votes.
The scanner didn’t accept her ballot, so she was given a second one. She scratched out that Q.R. code too. When the machine didn’t accept the second ballot, Messerlie asked for a provisional ballot. Poll workers refused her request, and the county election supervisor filed a complaint with the State Election Board accusing Messerlie of ballot tampering.
“I was just making a statement to myself hoping it might go through anyway, but of course it didn’t,” Messerlie said at the February 18 meeting of the State Election Board. She did not apologize for breaking the rule, instead insisting that the Q.R. codes were “illegal” and have been used to “flip” votes in past elections. The five-member board—dominated by three Trump-supporting election-denial activists—sympathized with Messerlie; rather than reprimand her, they gave her a letter detailing Georgia election rules that prohibit tampering with ballots.
Messerlie and other Republicans in Georgia’s election-denial movement, along with their allies on the State Election Board and in the GOP-controlled state legislature, have been pushing for a complete prohibition on voting machines since President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden—a loss they falsely attribute to voting fraud, of course. These efforts culminated with the passage in May 2024 of Senate Bill 189, which prohibits Q.R. codes from being used to tabulate votes.
That ban goes into effect on July 1. But state legislators, whose 2026 session ends a month from now, have yet to put forth a practical replacement system. Instead, Republican lawmakers have introduced three bills that seem expressly designed to cause chaos, if they could even be implemented in time for the fall elections; two of them call for poll workers—often low-paid temporary workers or retirees—to hand-count paper ballots in some or all cases.
If any one of these bills became law, it would cause errors and delays, according to bipartisan election officials and experts. And this could have consequences well beyond Georgia’s borders. As many as eight million people there are expected to vote in the November midterms, on everything from local contests and voter referendums to House and Senate races that could decide the balance of power in the U.S. Congress—and thus whether Democrats will have any power to check the Trump administration.
Joseph Kirk, the elections supervisor in Bartow County, conducts hand-count audits for each election. He knows how taxing the process can be even for small elections. “We see errors as the day goes on. The poll workers start out strong, but the longer they work, the more errors there are,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to hand-count a double-sided ballot, densely packed with races, questions, and trying to get through it at the end of a long day, with folks watching who are anxiously wanting the results.
“The most polite way I can say this,” he added, “is that it’s extraordinarily less than ideal.”
But Sara Tindall-Ghazal, the State Election Board’s lone Democrat, didn’t mince words in explaining how elected Republicans willingly courted this looming disaster. The Republicans who introduced the aforementioned bills are “hostage to an extremist group that does not represent the majority of voters,” she said. “The only reason we’re in this position is because they insist on catering to the election-denier universe.”
Georgia has become ground zero of MAGA’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud. In Fulton County, election deniers have homed in on poll-worker errors that led to more than 3,000 ballots being double-counted as possible evidence of an intentional effort to swing the 2020 election toward Biden. An election integrity official appointed by Trump referred the matter to the FBI, which in late January seized hundreds of thousands of ballots. No charges have been filed, and the bureau’s entire affidavit in the case was based on claims from some of the same election-denial activists who coordinate with the MAGA-dominated State Election Board.
Those same forces are demanding that poll workers hand-count as many as eight million ballots this fall, logistics be damned. With the legislative session set to end on April 6, some election officials are sounding the alarm. At a February 9 meeting, the Cobb County election board in metro Atlanta requested that the legislature delay the implementation of S.B. 189 and its Q.R. code prohibition by a year. Board member Jennifer Mosbacher, a Democratic appointee, said she didn’t see how implementing a new ballot tabulation system “before the midterm is even remotely possible.” Just one board member voted against the measure, urging the legislature to stay the course on the Q.R. code deadline: Debbie Fisher, a Republican appointee who has supported Trump’s lies about election fraud.
Supporters of hand counting point to other countries that do so, like France. But Kirk, Tindall-Ghazal, and others note that those countries have constructed their entire election administration systems around hand counts—not the machine counts that Georgia and most U.S. states have used for years. The only U.S. counties that counted ballots by hand in recent years—Nye County, Nevada, in 2022 and Gillespie County, Texas, in 2024—had results riddled with errors and took much longer to tabulate them than machines. In 2024, Spalding County, Georgia, experimented with a hand recount of local election results. The only errors in the recount came from ballots counted by hand, not machines reading Q.R. codes on ballots.
Several Texas counties counted ballots by hand in this week’s primary elections. In all cases, the results took longer than machine counts. In Gillespie County, it took as many as 60 workers to count 3,000 ballots. The results came in nearly four hours after machine counts from elsewhere in the state. In Eastland County, workers were so exhausted from hand-counting ballots that they asked local officials if they could switch to machine counts. The switch would have required a court order.
In Georgia, instead of introducing legislation that would narrowly address the Q.R. code issue, Republicans have written bills that invite the same problems those counties faced—but across their entire state.
Senate Bill 214, which was introduced by state Senator Max Burns, the author of the bill banning Q.R. codes, would implement optical scanners to read ballots and tabulate votes. Another bill, Senate Bill 568, would utilize a similar optical system to scan hand-marked paper ballots, in addition to requiring recounts to be conducted by hand. The most extreme bill, according to Democrats, is House Bill 1108, which requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots and hand counts of all elections.
All of the bills would require printers to print empty ballots for the hundreds or thousands of individual races that will occur in November—printers that the state does not have, since Georgians currently vote on machines which then print the filled-out ballots. S.B. 214 doesn’t provide funding for these “ballot on demand” printers but instead tasks Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office with procuring the technology and conducting a pilot program for their use. Raffensperger did not respond to a request for comment.
The influx of new equipment, just a few months out from a crucial election, will require significant training for poll workers. “We need time to pilot these systems to work the kinks out,” Kirk said, noting that poll-worker training begins in September. He and other election officials would prefer the significant changes to election systems currently being considered by the legislature to occur in a nonelection year.
Representative Saira Draper, a Democrat who represents parts of suburban Atlanta and served on a special legislative committee that met over the summer to workshop remedies for the Q.R. code ban, said there may not be enough ballot-on-demand printers available for purchase that meet federal and state election guidelines. She has also warned against such significant changes occurring in such a pivotal election year.
“There are straightforward ways to comply with the Q.R. code law that don’t require election overhauls, and that’s what any legislator acting in good faith should be advocating for at this juncture,” Draper said. Instead, almost two years since the Q.R. code ban went into effect, “they’ve dropped the ball,” she added. “Now they want the public to believe, [at the] eleventh hour, unvetted changes are necessary to fix a problem of their own making.”
Burns did not respond to a request for comment, nor did his co-sponsors on S.B. 214. None of the sponsors of H.B. 568 or H.B. 1108 responded to requests for comment.
One of this year’s most closely watched midterm contests is in Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff is fighting to retain his seat; the balance of the U.S. Senate may depend on it. But if H.B. 1108 were to become law, the whole country might have to wait weeks after the fall elections, or even longer, to learn which party has won control of the chamber.
“It’s silly to imagine that people can hand-tally all those votes, get all the right totals in all the right places, and report accurate results by precinct in every contest—much less that they can do it quickly,” said Mark Lindeman of Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that works with bipartisan election officials to advocate for secure election equipment. “For anyone who craves more controversy and conflict after elections, full hand counts are a great idea—but for voters overall, absolutely not.”
