Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia on Wednesday called lawmakers back to the capital next month to redraw the state’s legislative districts for the 2028 election cycle, and to work on changes to the state’s voting system.
The call for a special session, which will begin on June 17, comes as Southern lawmakers have been rushing to reconfigure congressional maps to be more favorable to Republicans for this year’s midterms in response to the recent Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But in Georgia, where early voting for next week’s primaries has already begun, lawmakers will instead consider new maps for 2028, taking action now in case Republicans lose control of the governor’s office or the State Legislature in November.
Some officials and voting experts have argued that the more pressing concern is a new law, set to go into effect on July 1, that would force the state to abandon its current system for counting votes. Such a change, experts warned, could cause widespread complications in November.
Mr. Kemp had faced calls to bring lawmakers back after they failed during their regular session to push back a deadline that would require the state to no longer use QR codes to tabulate ballots.
The new law, passed in 2024, was part of a Republican effort to overhaul election practices based on President Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his loss in Georgia in 2020, and on his persistent yet unfounded claims that victory had been stolen from him.
Critics of the system took issue with touch-screen voting machines, which print out a voter’s choices along with a QR code that includes the same information, but in a form that is indecipherable to humans. Those paper ballots are fed into a scanner that reads the QR code — a setup that, critics argue, does not allow voters to verify their choices.
Yet state lawmakers did not approve funding to replace the system, which would be rendered illegal under the law.
The pressure for a special session — a rarity in Georgia — intensified considerably last month after the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s congressional map, which had been drawn to have two majority-minority districts, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Mr. Kemp quickly signaled that, unlike other Southern states, Georgia would not try to change its maps in time for November, noting that early voting for the May 19 partisan primaries was already underway.
Still, he said that it was clear that the Supreme Court’s decision “requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle.” Under the current map, Republicans have nine congressional seats and Democrats have five.
Political analysts have predicted that Georgia lawmakers probably will not be able to go as far as their counterparts in other Southern states in eliminating safe Democratic seats. That is largely because of Atlanta and its suburbs, which have a long tradition of Black representation, and where demographic shifts have empowered Democrats to become competitive in Georgia after decades of entrenched Republican control.
But Republicans have identified Georgia’s Second Congressional District, which covers a swath of the southwestern part of the state, as perhaps the most vulnerable seat held by a Democrat. The district, represented since 1993 by Sanford Bishop, is the only one in the state with a Democratic incumbent that is outside Greater Atlanta.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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