Georgia bill to strip QR codes from ballots would cost tens of millions of dollars
The price tag could reach $300 million, says a top state election official. The legislature has allocated $0 — and set a two-year deadline.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Tucked inside a massive elections bill passed last month by Georgia’s legislature is a provision that requires the state to spend millions of dollars to overhaul the state’s existing voting system, or to purchase a new one before 2026.
Election officials and experts say it’s an impossible timeline, and that the vague language of the bill may prevent the use of electronic tabulators altogether. Lawmakers allocated no money for the change, which would remove computer-readable QR codes and other barcodes that the state’s voting system relies on to accurately tabulate ballots.
“We’re talking about an expense of about $25-to-$26 million, to about $300 million, depending on how you want to do it,” Gabe Sterling, the chief operating officer in the secretary of state’s office, told the House Governmental Affairs Committee on March 20, eight days before the bill passed the House. If lawmakers wanted to proceed, Sterling told them, they should write the legislation to make the changes contingent on appropriating enough money to pay for them, and move the effective date back to give election officials more time.
Lawmakers have already pushed the effective date back two years — from 2024 to 2026 — but did not make the change contingent on providing funding. So if the governor signs the bill now, it’s not clear where election officials will get the money.
The ban on computer-readable codes made headlines when the bill passed, but the cost — which legislators have known about for months — has not been previously reported.
The legislation would make the state’s current voting system, put in place in 2020 at a cost of more than $100 million, impossible for the state to use. Sterling says that if the governor signs it, Georgia will spend millions of dollars “to achieve absolutely nothing.”