Georgia is on the verge of reforming its voting system to prioritize paper ballots and hand-count verification for touch-screen early votes following new recommendations from a commission formed to assess the state’s voting procedures in the wake of the 2020 election disputes. 

The recommendations, if finalized by the Georgia General Assembly through legislation, will likely be implemented before the 2026 midterm elections later this year. 

The panel, the House Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Election Procedures, also recommended that the state legislature extend its mandate until December to continue to study the state’s election procedures and make further recommendations. 

Republican lawmakers introduced a bill in the Georgia Assembly following the panel’s recommendations. The proposal contains new voting regulations that match closely with the recommendations issued by the Blue-Ribbon Study Commission. 

You can read the current version of the bill below: 

Same-day voting only with paper ballots

The bill would mandate hand-marked paper ballots for use on Election Day, which would be tabulated by machine. During early voting, Georgia voters would have the option to choose between filling out a paper ballot by hand or selecting candidates on the state’s current touch-screen machines. The touch-screen system would print out a paper ballot receipt that the bill would require poll workers to hand count. 

To address concerns that this new process would take too long to provide results, all touch-screen early votes would include a QR code that could be scanned to provide unofficial results. Official results, however, would only be reported after the hand-count. 

The recommendations come on the heels of a surprise FBI search of the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations Center in metro Atlanta and calls from President Donald Trump for Republicans in Congress to federalize aspects of elections due to the potential for corruption. The FBI reportedly seized pallets of 2020 election documents, including ballots.

Kemp: “Sloppy” and “inconsistent” election data

The Justice Department also sued Fulton County, the epicenter of President Trump’s claims of fraud in the state, earlier this year to obtain its 2020 election records. 

In November 2021, one year after the 2020 presidential election, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp referred the “sloppy” and “inconsistent” election data maintained by the county to the State Elections Board after multiple reviews found significant problems with absentee ballot counting that included duplicate tallies, math errors, and transposed data. 

Salleigh Grubbs, a new member of the Georgia State Election Board, said she felt "disbelief" that the FBI was raiding the Fulton election hub, and that it had "been a long time coming."

"I can only imagine it would have something to do with the subpoenas that have been issued previously, so, that's just a guess. I don't know anything for sure," she said, later adding, "I don't know what they've requested, don't know what they've asked for, I'm just hoping we'll get more answers."

Evidence of duplicate vote counting

Post-2020 election investigations and reports have confirmed irregularities in the election process in Georgia's most populous county. In 2021, Just the News found that the tally sheets the county used for audits and recounts did not match totals from ballot images, appearing to be duplicate counts. 

The FBI search on Wednesday also follows Fulton County informing the State Election Board last month that tabulator tapes were not properly signed after the 2020 election, in violation of state regulations, as Atlanta News First reported. Additionally, the county explained that it had misplaced other tabulator tapes and documents from that election.

The tabulator tapes are essentially receipts printed from ballot tabulation machines used to verify that the number of voters matches the number of votes.

Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, whose office sued Fulton County last year, said a review of the seized records will be important to determining the extent of any errors or mismanagement in Georgia’s most populous county.  

“We're going to see what we see, and whatever the evidence shows,” Harmeet Dhillon told the Just the News, No Noise TV show earlier this week. “I think it's important for the American people to know what happened in Fulton County and in Georgia and to prevent gross errors or malfeasance from happening again. I think that's just important for the integrity and confidence of the public in our elections.” 

Trump calls for federalized vote supervision

Separately, President Trump has ramped up his criticism of certain states and localities for what he says are “horribly run elections” in recent days, even going so far as to say Republicans in Washington should “take over” voting in more than a dozen places ahead of the midterm elections. 

“I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, doubling down on a proposal he floated in an interview with Dan Bongino – newly returned to the podcast world after his stint at the FBI – earlier this week. 

“Because if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do ’em anyway,” he added. “But when you see some of these states, about how horribly they run their elections, what a disgrace it is, I think the federal government [should get involved].”

The president did not provide a full list, but referenced Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta as places where there is “horrible corruption in elections,” The Hill reported.

The White House has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which would mandate voter ID nationwide, remove noncitizens from voter rolls, and provide criminal penalties for anyone who registers an individual to vote who fails to present proof of U.S. citizenship. 

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that President Trump was referring to the passage of the SAVE Act when he asked Republicans in Congress to act in federal elections.