The Georgia General Assembly adjourned its 2026 legislative session on Thursday, April 3, without passing a controversial bill that would have mandated the hand-counting of paper ballots in all elections. The proposal, House Bill 1207, had cleared the House but failed to advance in the Senate before the midnight deadline.
The legislation sought to replace the current optical scan machines used to tabulate votes with a full manual count of paper ballots, a process critics argued would be time-consuming, costly, and prone to human error. Proponents, citing unfounded claims about election security, argued it was necessary to ensure trust in the results.
With the session's end, the bill is effectively dead for the year. Election procedures in Georgia will continue to use the existing electronic scanning system, which produces a paper record of each vote. The failure of the bill marks a significant outcome in an ongoing national debate over election administration following the 2020 presidential election.
