Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia signed legislation late Thursday delaying a major change to the state’s election system that had threatened to cause chaos in the November midterm elections.
Republican lawmakers, spurred by President Trump’s baseless claims about a stolen election in 2020, passed a measure in 2024 that outlawed the use of QR codes on ballots to count votes. The law gave the state legislature a deadline of July 1, 2026, to devise a viable alternative, yet lawmakers failed to do that by the end of the regular session in April.
Mr. Kemp, a two-term Republican in his final months in office, summoned them back to the Capitol last week for a special session to avert what election officials and experts warned could be a crisis. Lawmakers opted to punt the deadline to Jan. 1, 2028, leaving the matter for the next governor and legislature to solve just before a presidential election.
The pushback to the QR codes, which machines read to count votes, is among the many aftereffects of the 2020 election in Georgia, when Mr. Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state in nearly 30 years. He refused to acknowledge the loss and tried to get the result overturned, but was blocked by Mr. Kemp and the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.
In recent months, the Trump administration has deployed the Justice Department to re-examine the president’s already-debunked claims about election fraud in Fulton County, which is Georgia’s most populous. In January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized 2020 ballots, voter rolls and other documents from the county’s election center.
Soon after the 2020 election, Republican lawmakers passed sweeping legislation with the stated aim of shoring up the integrity of Georgia’s election process. The state expanded the acceptable grounds for challenging voter eligibility and added limits on absentee voting.
But critics condemned the efforts as adding unnecessary burdens that curtailed access to the polls for many voters and made the work of carrying out an election more cumbersome.
Some Republicans argued that QR codes — which are undecipherable by the human eye alone — were a vulnerability that could be exploited. Election security experts have raised broader concerns about the potential for tampering with the touch-screen machines used in elections statewide, although those experts say there is no evidence of that taking place in Georgia.
Under the state’s current system, voters use the touch-screen machines to make their ballot choices, which are then printed on a sheet of paper along with a QR code. Voters can review their choices on the printout. But a scanner counts their choices using the QR code, and voters cannot know for sure if that code accurately reflects their ballot selections.
State lawmakers did not approve a plan for implementing a new system or the funding to pay for it.
The new law creates a committee made up of appointees of the governor and the legislature that will evaluate options for a new statewide system that uses hand-marked paper ballots and make a recommendation. It also requires recounting ballots by hand in many statewide races if the margin between candidates is within half of a percentage point.
Election officials across the state cautioned that abandoning the QR codes would render voting machines and software unusable, leaving them to count ballots by hand. The result, they predicted, would be disarray during this fall’s election, including pivotal races for governor and U.S. Senate that could be decided by narrow margins and will be subjected to intense scrutiny.
“Georgia is on the brink of an election nightmare,” Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County, northwest of Atlanta, and the president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, wrote this month in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mr. Kemp called a special session that began last week for lawmakers to address the QR code issue and to redraw legislative district lines more favorably for Republicans for the 2028 election.
But Republican leaders in the legislature balked at redistricting this year, angering some in the party who had wanted lawmakers to act before an election that could potentially land a Democrat in the governor’s office. Legislative leaders were worried that moving forward this year would galvanize Democrats and other voters opposed to redistricting.
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