Georgia was going to get rid of the voting machines that Trump hates. But then things got complicated

ATLANTA (AP) — The stars appear to have aligned with Republicans to take down their biggest target — touch-screen voting machines in Georgia.

But the complex reality of changing voting systems has gotten in the way, despite the rise of 2020 election deniers to influential places in state government and Donald Trump’s second administration.

Instead, it seems increasingly likely that Georgia voters will continue to cast their ballots next November on machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which was purchased by a company called Liberty Vote. The machines print a paper ballot containing a QR code, a type of barcode, that scanners use to count votes.

The president and his allies continue to claim that machines deleted or altered votes in 2020, despite a lack of supporting evidence and large sums of money being paid to Dominion in defamation settlements. Trump in March 2025 issued an executive order that purportedly mostly banned the use of bar codes in vote counting and required voters to be able to read their recorded selections. A federal judge blocked that ruling in a lawsuit filed by Washington state.

Enemies of the barcode demanded their removal

Meanwhile, Georgia Republicans were backing themselves into a corner. Lawmakers passed a law two years ago setting a deadline of July 1 of this year to remove bar codes from ballots. Some people fundamentally distrust ballots that are counted using a code that humans cannot read. But lawmakers and administrators failed to agree on any action to fulfill that law’s mandates — and, more importantly, no funding was ever provided.

The promised death of QR codes has been popular among the cadre of conservative activists who have been agitating for voting changes since Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia. Those allies now control the Georgia State Board of Elections and made the allegations cited by the FBI in its seizure of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a solidly Democratic area that is at the center of never-ending fraud allegations.

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“Hands. Marked. Paper. Ballots. I won’t be moved. I won’t be moved. Understood?” State Board of Elections member Sally Grubbs wrote on social media Sunday as word leaked out about a proposed delay to the July 1 deadline.

Opponents of the devices point out that the computer code has been spread online, including after Trump supporters obtained it from the elections office in Coffee County, Georgia. Although the devices are not connected to the Internet, the scan found software vulnerabilities that could be exploited if someone gained physical access. Dominion issued patches to fix the software problem, but Republican lawmakers have not allocated any money for GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to update the software.

The changes could have been disturbing

Some proposals to meet the deadline to remove QR codes called for radical changes to voting or vote counting in Georgia. It would have required a hand count of every ballot cast in person before Election Day. This is the most popular way to vote in Georgia. Another proposal was to assign voters to one early voting location, rather than allowing them to vote at any early voting location in their county. Such a shift to specific locations of county-level voting led to confusion in two counties in recent Texas primaries.

Behind these false starts is a growing consensus that hand-marked ballots counted by scanners are the way forward. Lawmakers said during a committee hearing Tuesday that they hope to buy printers that produce ballots as needed rather than paying to pre-print millions of ballots. But that comes with the recognition that it’s too late to make a major shift in time for November.

Read more: A new poll shows that Americans are increasingly concerned about voting

Republican Rep. Victor Anderson of Cornelia, who chairs the House Governmental Affairs Committee, said the shift away from bar codes this year threatens “severe disruption to our election system.”

“This was not going to happen,” Anderson said.

Instead, his committee introduced a bill that would require the state to choose a new voting system not by July 1, but by 2028. Lawmakers also pledged to allocate money to purchase new equipment for Georgia’s 159 counties.

Some still need convincing

It’s not a done deal yet. The full House of Representatives and the more conservative Senate must still vote in favor of the measure, and the Senate in particular may reject it. Lt. Gov. Bert Jones, who Trump endorsed in his 2026 bid for governor, did not respond to a request for comment.

But one Republican state senator, who has been a leading proponent of the shift to hand-marked paper ballots, now also acknowledges that November just isn’t possible anymore.

“I’m disappointed about the timeline, but at this point, we have the choice of making an informed legislative decision or unfortunately dealing with an unrealistic legal choice,” Sen. Max Burns of Sylvania told The Associated Press after the hearing.

One part of the bill that appeals to conservative activists but is unpopular with Democrats shifts authority for some post-election audits from the secretary of state to the state board of elections. David Worley, a Democrat who previously served on the board, called the group “hyperpartisan” and warned that it did not have the capacity or staff to conduct the audit.

But local officials are heaping praise, saying the delay will avert potential chaos.

“This is something that sets us up for success, not failure,” Deidre Holden, elections director for Paulding County in Atlanta, said of the delay. “The schedule was my biggest concern.”