No, Stacey Abrams Didn’t Bring Hand-Marked Paper Ballots to Georgia

Remember when I told you I didn’t agree with everything that is posted on this site? Well, here you go.

Shepherd wrote this week that “Stacey Abrams … long advocated for Georgia’s voting system to be scrapped in favor of hand-marked paper ballots,” and then framed the current GOP interest in hand-marked ballots as some sort of late-breaking partisan inversion.

Abrams absolutely did advocate for hand-marked paper ballots, and Jason is right about that part of the story.

But the larger framing is wrong, and it matters, because it rewrites Georgia’s actual timeline, and it erases the fact that the first serious push to move Georgia off paperless touchscreen voting, and toward hand-marked paper ballots with machine tabulation and meaningful audits, came from the right. And it came years before Abrams made it a talking point on the campaign trail.

It came from me.

Here is the part that keeps getting lost whenever people want to turn election administration into a red-team-blue-team morality play.

2015: I introduced legislation to move Georgia away from our aging DRE touchscreen system and toward paper ballots, long before this became a trendy partisan talking point. I stated this plainly, on the record, in a sworn written statement to Congress describing my work starting in 2015.

2017: After years of work and conversations with election officials, I introduced HB 641, which focused on requiring a voter-verifiable paper audit record for Georgia elections.

January 2018: I introduced HB 680, a full-on attempt to replace Georgia’s touchscreens with a paper-ballot system, paired with audits, because paper without audits is just paper. That bill got covered at the time precisely as an effort to scrap Georgia’s touchscreen voting and return to paper ballots.

So yes, Abrams advocated for hand-marked paper ballots, but no, she did not “bring the idea to Georgia,” because Georgia already had Republican legislators pushing it, publicly and in bill form, years earlier.

This was never a clean partisan issue, and pretending otherwise is how we got here. Shepherd’s post treats paper ballots as “the rhetorical holy grail of the left,” and today’s GOP interest as some kind of late-night reversal. But in Georgia, the paper ballot argument has always been a weird coalition, computer scientists and election integrity activists, some Democrats, some Republicans, and a lot of regular voters who just wanted something they could understand, verify, and audit.

Even outside Georgia, the basic election security consensus for years has been: paper ballots that voters can verify, plus audits robust enough to catch and correct outcome-changing errors. Groups like Verified Voting have been explicit about the security distinction between hand-marked ballots and machine-marked ballots, and why minimizing ballot-marking devices matters when you care about software risk and real-world voter verification behavior.

In fact, in spite of the common misperception that hand marked paper ballots are easy targets for fraud, the majority of Americans cast their ballots using one. Election security, chain of custody, and laws have come a long way to prevent the mythic “Dodge County” like days of the last century, and anyone who claims that is woefully uninformed on how things work decades later. And yet, somehow, Georgia’s system continues to be the target of conspiracy theorists and grifters from all over the place.

So if the point is “evaluate proposals on the merits,” great, I agree, but then we should stop telling fairy tales about who owned which idea first, and we should stop acting like every election administration debate is just a jersey swap.

Courts “declining” to order a remedy is not the same thing as experts “declining” to recognize risk. Shepherd argues there is “no credible evidence” that elections conducted exclusively with hand-marked paper ballots are categorically more secure than systems producing paper records and subject to audits, and he leans on the fact that judges declined to order hand-marked paper ballots as a litigation remedy.

But litigation outcomes are about standards of proof, jurisdiction, remedies, timing, and judicial restraint, not a scientific stamp of approval on whatever system a state happens to be using at the moment, and not a declaration that all “paper-backed” systems are equal in verifiability.

If you want to argue for ballot-marking devices, or against them, you can, but do it honestly: talk about usability, accessibility, throughput, chain-of-custody, audit design, and what exactly gets tabulated (human-readable text versus a barcode or QR code), and do not pretend that “a judge wouldn’t order it” settles the security debate.

“Georgia already votes on paper,” sure, but let’s not pretend all paper is the same. Georgia’s current system prints a paper ballot, but for years the counting relied on QR codes that voters cannot read, which is the core verifiability complaint, because you cannot verify what you cannot interpret. And I want to be clear here because two things can be and in this case are true at the same time; I do not believe that the the QR codes are a source of fraud. But I also spent so much time researching this issue prior to landing on HB 680 in 2018 that I came to understand that there would be a large number of people who didn’t trust the outcome.

In fact, I predicted, with stunning accuracy, the rise of of the Election Integrity Industrial Complex if we went down the road of all BMD voting with QR codes.

Abrams did not invent the hand-marked paper ballot argument in Georgia, and she did not “bring it here.”

I did that, starting in 2015, and I put it in legislation, repeatedly, because I believed then, and still believe now, that the right way to build confidence is through systems voters can understand, verify, and audit.

If Republicans want to embrace hand-marked paper ballots today, fine, but it is not some new epiphany, and it is not some borrowed Abrams relic, it is a policy debate Georgia conservatives have been having, and in my case leading, for over a decade.