ATLANTA — As election security continues to be a heated topic across the country, a move to use hand-marked paper ballots is on the minds of many Georgians.

Supporters of hand-marked paper ballots say it is a more secure method of voting and is less susceptible to errors or hacks that could result from using electronic voting devices.

While Georgia uses electronic ballot marking devices by Dominion Voting Systems as the only way to vote in-person since 2020, more than 40 states have hand-marked ballots as an option to vote in-person, with ballot marking devices as an available option by request.

“I think that the primary way of voting should be the hand-marked paper ballots,” said Sam Carnline, co-founder of Georgians for Truth. “Here’s why: one person, one piece of paper, a machine can’t duplicate my vote. And if you go back and do a forensic investigation of an election, you can tell whether it’s been duped or not.”

Georgians for Truth is among several groups pushing for hand-marked paper ballots in Georgia’s voting system as part of the “Paper Please” campaign.

“We need paper ballots, hand counted at the precinct, including absentee, on election day. This decentralizes the process and allows for greatest transparency,” the group states on its website.

Election critics have heightened criticism over electronic voting systems following the 2020 presidential election when then-President Donald Trump questioned Georgia’s and other states’ results following his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffesnperger oversaw several audits, including a hand recount, which he said confirmed Biden’s victory. He has continuously defended off attacks against Georgia’s elections.

Dominion Voting Systems retained MITRE’s National Election Security Lab to provide an independent review of various claims made by a researcher hired by the plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to prohibit the use of electronic voting machines.

“…For years, election deniers have created a cottage industry of ever-shifting claims about conspiracies to change votes, steal elections, and undermine voter confidence,” Raffensperger said. “(The MITRE) report says it all: voting machines do not flip votes. Cast ballots are counted as the voter intended. Georgia elections are secure.”

The current process to vote in person in Georgia requires a voter card to be inserted in a touch screen machine, which displays the voter’s ballot. After a voter completes their ballot on the screen, their paper ballot is printed that includes a QR code and a summary of the voter’s selections.

The voter must then scan their paper ballot into a machine that scans the QR code to submit their ballot.

Carnline referred to the paper as a “ballot receipt” or “ballot image” instead of an actual ballot. He said the QR code ballot violates the Georgia code, which requires a ballot to be readable by the elector.

“It’s spoiled because of the QR code; the QR code is how it’s counted,” he opined.

A 2019 report from the Georgia Secure, Accessible, & Fair Elections (SAFE) Commission — sanctioned to study different options for Georgia’s next voting system — appears to support the use of QR codes, noting that voting systems demonstrated to the Commission used either bar codes, QR codes, or optical character recognition (OCR) in order to tabulate marked ballots.

“Georgia law should be updated to clarify that the human-readable component of the ballot is the official vote record,” the report states. “Given the Commission’s next recommendation that Georgia requires post-election, pre-certification audits, we do not believe it is prudent for Georgia to not consider a vendor based on their method of tabulation, whether it be bar code, QR code, or OCR.”

As the fear of electronic voting processes’ potential for errors, hacking or vote flipping is the among common concerns of opponents, moving to hand-marked ballots could come with more timely and costlier challenges.

The SAFE Commission heard testimony from numerous county election officials who voiced concerns about the cost of a hand-marked paper ballot system.

“These officials pointed out that in a hand-marked paper ballot system, more costs are pushed to the counties,” the report states. “County election officials also testified moving to a hand-marked paper ballot system would require major changes for poll workers and would lead to increased risk of voters not getting the correct ballot. In some precincts in Georgia, poll workers have as many as a dozen ballot styles to choose from depending on where exactly a voter resides.”

After using the ballot-marking devices with verifiable paper ballots in a pilot project during a municipal election, Rockdale County Elections Director Cynthia Willingham said that using the new system “saved time during opening and closing procedures in precincts, allowed faster reporting of results, and maintained existing functionalities like being quickly able to provide all ballot styles needed during advance voting,” according to the report.

Carnline said election skeptics won’t warm back up to election security until hand-marked paper ballots become an option for voters.

“I don’t have a problem with people that want to vote on them. If you trust them, you trust them. but let me vote on a paper ballot because I don’t trust the machines,” he said.

A room full of attendees packed out a Georgia Senate Committee meeting to speak on the Georgia voting system, many of them urging lawmakers to move toward hand-marked paper ballots.

The move to Georgia’s ballot marking devices in 2020

Prior to 2020, the state had used Direct Recording Electronic machines since 2002.

DREs directly record the voter’s selections after the image of a ballot appears on an electronic display screen. There was no paper backup with the machines.

The SAFE Commission’s Jan. 2019 report reflected that leading up to the November 2016 general election, citizens across the country began to question election security in the United States and whether DRE machines and other components of the voting system could be compromised. There were concerns that if the machines were to be hacked, there was no backup of votes or a paper trail.

The report by the commission recommended that Georgia remain a uniform system state, with each county using the same equipment that is initially provided by the state to eliminate disparate counting. It also recommended Georgia should keep using a touch screen voting machine for an easier transition, and adopt and implement a voting system with a verifiable paper vote record in time for the 2020 election.

“The system should create an auditable paper record for every vote that the voter has an opportunity to review before casting. Rules should be put in place ensuring a rigorous chain of custody for these paper records,” the report noted.

The report notes testimony from, Anne Kuhns, an attorney with the Georgia Advocacy Office, who commented on the need for any new voting system to have an audio-ballot component for the visually impaired, which the new Dominion Voting System’s ballot marking devices does.

SAFE Commission member Dr. Wenke Lee, Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institution for Technology, was one of a few on the commission who favored hand-marked paper ballots, saying that they are more secure than ballots marked using ballot-marking devices.

“This view is also held and was expressed to the commission by Verified Voting and numerous professors in computer science and cybersecurity,” the commission’s report notes. “Dr. Lee’s concern with ballot-marking devices with verifiable paper ballots is that there is not a systemic study that shows that voters actually do verify their ballot selection even when they have the opportunity.”