Georgia lawmakers ended their annual session early Friday without resolving a conflict over voting equipment that could shape how Georgians vote in November, according to the Associated Press. The lack of an agreed plan by a July 1 deadline has raised questions about whether the state will need court involvement or a special legislative session to determine how elections should proceed.
The dispute centers on the state’s current use of Dominion Voting machines, which make voters’ selections and 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 Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.
Lawmakers did not allocate money to reprogram the machines, and they failed to agree on a replacement as the session ended, leaving election officials and lawmakers to consider competing pathways for coming months. House Speaker Jon Burns said he would meet with Gov. Brian Kemp and “take his temperature” on whether there could be a special session, while Kemp spokesperson Carter Chapman said the Republican governor will examine the bills that passed and “the consequence of those that did not pass.”
Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper criticized Republicans for not acting, saying, “They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” and she argued the impasse has contributed to uncertainty ahead of the November election. Draper also said Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for governor, appeared more focused on keeping Trump’s backing than “doing right by Georgia voters.”
Senate Republicans had not considered a proposal backed by House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Victor Anderson, who said lawmakers could face legal and administrative problems on July 1. Anderson warned that, “We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” according to the AP, and he argued that lawmakers must fix the problem through legislation, saying, “This is a legislative problem. It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”
Anderson’s proposal, which House and Republicans and Democrats backed, would have required Georgia to choose a voting process that didn’t use QR codes by 2028. Election officials, the AP reported, preferred that approach, and the Legislature’s end-of-session failure to bridge the gap has left the state with competing timelines and authorities.
Elections officials said quickly moving to the hand-marked paper ballot approach advocated by some supporters would be difficult under the schedule on the table. Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover said in the AP report that switching systems within just a few months as some Republicans sought would be nearly impossible and pointed to operational problems, including that “a very large number of ballots would have to be printed” under some plans.
Other election administrators also raised concerns about the practical feasibility of changes on short notice. Paulding County Election Supervisor Deidre Holden said lawmakers appeared to focus on political scoring rather than practical planning, adding that, “If anyone is resilient and can get the job done, it’s all of us election officials, but the legislators need to work with us, and they need to understand what we do before they go making laws that are basically unachievable for us.”
On the ground, Joseph Kirk, the Bartow County election supervisor and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, said he plans to look to the state secretary of state for guidance and assumes a judge will rule on how election officials should proceed. “This is uncharted territory,” Kirk said.
Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said officials are “ready to follow the law and follow the Constitution.” Burns told reporters his chamber was trying to limit changes this year, saying, “You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” as he and others described efforts to minimize disruption while the Legislature remains at an impasse.
An election-system overhaul also raises the possibility of a fallback, since Anderson warned that without action the state could be required to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in November. Supporters of switching to hand-marked paper ballots lobbied lawmakers for an immediate change, but the House turned away from a Senate proposal to do so, leaving the legal and administrative path for November uncertain as the session concluded.