(The Center Square) – Three weeks after the Georgia Senate failed to pass a bill requiring hand-marked ballots for the November elections, a revamped House bill with the same requirement was approved.
In its original form, House Bill 960 would have added a 12th Superior Court judge to the Gwinnett Judicial Circuit.
The amended bill presented by Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, on Friday contained some of the same language as Senate Bill 568, which failed on crossover day. House Bill 960 still requires hand-marked ballots for the November 2026 general election and requires a manual recount of some elections.
The new version reduces the $10,000 fine that election boards were facing for each ineligible voter to $100.
Election officials will also be required to have preprinted ballots at each voting location and publish a voter turnout list by 11:59 p.m. on Election Night.
Senate Minority Whip Kim Jackson of Stone Mountain said preprinted ballots would be a challenge in DeKalb County.
“We have 400 different ballot styles,” Jackson said. “So what this bill requires DeKalb County to do, with no funding to help with that by the way, is to make sure that all 432 permutations of our ballots are on location at every single voting and every single early voting location. We have built in all kind of opportunity for human error, not alone, the major security risks and concerns that I have when you have thousands and thousands of pre-printed ballots sitting in someone’s fellowship hall.”
The bill comes at a cost to local election officials. Joseph Kirk, president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials and Bartow County Election Supervisor, said in an interview with The Center Square that he doesn’t yet have a feel for what the price tag would be to print the additional paper ballots.
“We’re printing out more paper ballots than we probably need to be on the safe side,’ Kirk said. “That’s a lot of stacks of paper sitting around.”
Senate Democrats spent more than an hour giving speeches opposing the bill, which passed 32-21 along party lines. No Republicans spoke in favor of the bill.
“At its core, this bill is not about about improving elections,” said Atlanta Democrat RaShaun Kemp. “It’s about undermining confidence in them and I hope I am wrong in saying, but it truly feels like it’s another attempt to give a colleague something to run on.” Dolezal is running for lieutenant governor.
Stone Mountain Democrat Randal Mangham said the bill’s revision was like “Groundhog Day” and called it “a conspiracy theorist wishlist dressed up as election legislation.”
“This is a concentrated effort from Washington, D.C. all the way to Georgia and that’s the problem we have,” Mangham said. “We’re attacking Democracy at its core.”
Dolezal defended the bill, saying it was time for the state to go to hand-marked paper ballots. He showed a map outlining in green states that use hand-marked ballots.
“All that we’re asking is for Georgians to become green, to vote the way that the vast majority of people in America vote,” Dolezal said.
The House of Representatives would have to approve the amended House Bill 960 before it could go to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk.
The bill is opposed by the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials.
“This is not as easy as flipping a light switch,” Kirk said. “It takes time and the timeline contemplated by House Bill 960 is between mid-June and about early September, when we are going to start ramping up for the November general election.” And that simply isn’t enough time to get everything we need to get done, everything tested that we need to test, everything written that we need to write to make this successful statewide.”
The association supports Senate Bill 214, which would delay the removal of QR codes required by Senate Bill 189, passed by the General Assembly in 2024. The bill passed the Senate and is now in the House for consideration.
