ATLANTA — Electronic voting system detractors continue to push for paper ballots in Georgia, while Secretary of State State Brad Raffesnperger vigorously defends the security of the state’s voting systems.

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.

Since 2020, Georgia has used electronic ballot marking devices by Dominion Voting Systems as the only way to vote in-person. More than 40 other states have hand-marked ballots as an option to vote in-person, with ballot marking devices also available, according information compiled by Ballotpedia.

“I think that the primary way of voting should be the hand-marked paper ballots,” said Sam Carnline, co-founder of Georgians for Truth, a grassroots conservative voting organization. “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’s website pushes the need for paper ballots despite audits of the 2020 presidential election showing no evidence of election fraud or election tampering.

The group has continued the narrative at grassroots political gatherings around the state and videos on its blog.

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

Election critics’ questioning of the validity of electronic voting systems heightened following the 2020 presidential election when then-President Donald Trump challenged and sought to overturn Georgia’s and other states’ results following his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Raffesnperger has defended the security of the existing system and said that measures are in place to protect the system during next year’s election cycle. Raffesnperger oversaw several audits, including a hand recount, which he said confirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. He has continuously fended off attacks against Georgia’s election security.

He has said the state will delay security upgrades to the state’s electronic voting system until after the 2024 election cycle, due to time constraints.

Dominion Voting Systems retained MITRE’s National Election Security Lab to provide an independent review of 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.”

In-person voting in Georgia requires a voter card to be inserted into a touchscreen machine, which displays the voter’s ballot. After a voter completes the ballot on the screen, a paper ballot is printed that includes a QR code and a summary of the voter’s selections.

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

A 2019 report from the Georgia Secure, Accessible, & Fair Elections (SAFE) Commission — sanctioned to study 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.

Moving to hand-marked ballots could come with more timely and costlier challenges. The SAFE Commission heard testimony from several county election officials this week 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

Before 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 January 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 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. It also recommended that Georgia keep using touchscreen voting machines 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 include.

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.

“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.”