LOCALApril 12, 2026
Greg Dolezal goes ‘On the Record,’ pushes hand-marked ballots in lieutenant governor bid - Atlanta News First
Georgia state Senator Greg Dolezal appeared on Atlanta News First's 'On the Record' program to discuss his campaign for lieutenant governor, where he advocated for hand-marked paper ballots as a central policy position. Dolezal is seeking the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Georgia ahead of the 2026 election cycle. His push for hand-marked ballots represents a broader movement within the Georgia GOP to change the state's current voting system.
Would switching to hand-marked ballots in Georgia restore voter trust or create new vulnerabilities in election security?
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QR code auditability gap legitimacy
C
A system whose vote record is encoded in a QR code that no ordinary voter can read without specialized equipment asks citizens to trust an unreadable intermediary between their intent and the count. This is not a conspiracy theory — researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Michigan have raised it as a structural critique about the architecture of verification itself. Conservative governance has always prioritized transparent, legible institutions over efficient ones that demand deference to expert administrators.
L
The QR-code concern is a real technical argument worth engaging — we won't dismiss it. But Dolezal's campaign is not emerging from a neutral policy vacuum; it surfaces in the direct wake of 2020 election denialism, advanced by a party whose own Secretary of State defended the current system and whose results were confirmed through three separate hand-count audits. When the policy solution aligns perfectly with the grievance that birthed it, the burden of proof rises sharply.
C
The political genealogy of a technical critique does not automatically invalidate the critique — liberals should resist treating association with 2020 denialism as a complete rebuttal of the auditability problem. If a compromised encoding were systematic, a recount of the same machine-generated barcodes would replicate the same error, meaning past audits don't actually close the structural gap.
L
That's a fair point, and the honest liberal answer is that the proportionate response is not wholesale system replacement — Georgia could mandate human-readable printed summaries alongside QR codes and implement risk-limiting audits drawn from voter-verified paper trails, addressing the auditability gap without blowing up the existing infrastructure.
Past audits validating current system
C
The 2024 election result — Trump carrying Georgia on the very machines that were supposedly biased — does not vindicate the system so much as illustrate that this debate was never really about a single outcome. The legitimate structural question — can a citizen audit their own vote without trusting a QR code scanner? — persists regardless of who wins. Courts declining to order replacement mid-election-cycle is a procedural judgment about disruption, not an endorsement of the system's design philosophy.
L
The conservative framing conveniently separates the structural critique from its political deployment, but Trump's 2024 Georgia victory on the same Dominion system his party spent years calling compromised reveals exactly how selective this skepticism is. Georgia's BMDs survived three hand-count audits, multiple recounts, and a presidential result the loudest machine critics didn't like — and then accepted when it favored their candidate.
C
Pointing out that critics accepted the 2024 result cuts both ways — it actually confirms the system wasn't selectively rigged, which is precisely the conservative argument that this is a structural concern rather than an outcome-based one. The question of whether a citizen can independently verify their ballot doesn't become less valid because one election broke a certain way.
L
If this were truly about structure and not outcomes, the reform push would have predated 2020 — the fact that it didn't, and that it intensified only after a disputed loss, is evidence the structural language is doing political work here.
Accessibility costs of hand-marked ballots
C
Hand-marked paper ballots are the standard in most of the democratic world, including countries with strong records of electoral integrity. The argument that returning to paper is somehow retrograde inverts the burden of proof: it is the newer, more complex system that must justify itself to the public it serves. Canada and Germany manage accessible, auditable paper systems without treating accessibility and transparency as mutually exclusive.
L
The conservative appeal to international comparisons papers over a specific American legal context: the Help America Vote Act of 2002 established federal accessibility standards precisely because paper-only systems historically excluded voters with disabilities from casting independent, private ballots. A policy that trades an auditability concern for concrete disenfranchisement of voters with visual impairments, motor disabilities, and limited English proficiency is not a neutral upgrade — those costs fall hardest on communities already underrepresented in Georgia's electorate.
C
The accessibility concern is a genuine counter-obligation, not a dismissal of the reform — but it is only a decisive objection if proponents refuse to fund accessible ballot-marking assistance devices retained specifically for voters with disabilities, which is exactly what a credible transition plan must include. Dolezal's campaign should be pressed on that specific commitment before the proposal earns legislative support.
L
Agreed that accessibility devices could theoretically be retained, but 'should be pressed on that commitment' is doing a lot of work — the proposal as it stands doesn't include those guarantees, and a reform that creates new procurement burdens and accessibility risks without a funded implementation plan is not ready for serious legislative consideration.
Institutional lock-in from procurement decisions
C
The $107 million Dominion contract locked Georgia into a proprietary system in 2019, illustrating a broader problem with large government technology procurement: once the infrastructure is bought, bureaucratic inertia and sunk-cost logic entrench it regardless of whether better alternatives exist. Conservative skepticism of concentrated, opaque government systems — whether in surveillance, taxation, or elections — should apply with equal force to voting infrastructure.
L
The conservative critique of sunk-cost entrenchment is reasonable in the abstract, but applying it here requires ignoring that Georgia's current contract was itself a procurement to replace older, less reliable direct-recording electronic machines. A fresh transition to hand-marked ballots would impose new procurement costs, infrastructure investment, and poll worker retraining on county officials who have already navigated two system changes in less than a decade.
C
The fact that Georgia already made one costly transition is an argument for getting the architecture right this time, not for accepting a system with a structural auditability problem indefinitely. Sunk costs don't become a reason to maintain a system — that's the exact bureaucratic inertia conservatives are criticizing.
L
The difference is that Georgia's last transition was responding to documented failures in direct-recording electronic machines — this proposed transition is responding to a structural concern that every adversarial audit, recount, and federal court proceeding has declined to find evidence of in actual practice.
Dolezal's institutional leverage for reform
C
Lieutenant governors in Georgia preside over the Senate, giving Dolezal, if elected, genuine institutional leverage to advance this reform through the chamber where it must originate. That makes this a substantive policy campaign, not mere posturing. The case for paper is strong on first principles and should be made on those grounds — cleanly, without relitigating 2020.
L
The institutional leverage argument would be more convincing if the campaign were making that clean, first-principles case — but the political energy behind hand-marked ballot advocacy traces directly to unsubstantiated 2020 fraud claims, and Dolezal is running in a party whose activists spent years calling the machines compromised. Genuine reform proposals don't typically require their proponents to first disavow the movement that gave them political traction.
C
Requiring a reformer to perform a loyalty test by disavowing his political coalition before his ideas get a hearing is a way of dismissing the substance without engaging it. The QR-code auditability gap exists whether or not every supporter of paper ballots has clean hands on 2020.
L
It's not a loyalty test — it's a credibility test, and the credibility of election reform proposals matters enormously when trust in elections is already fragile. A lieutenant governor candidate who wants to be taken seriously on this issue has an affirmative obligation to clearly separate the structural critique from the delegitimization politics, not leave that work to his critics.
Conservative's hardest question
The most serious challenge to this argument is that every independent audit, recount, and federal court proceeding examining Georgia's specific BMD implementation has declined to find it untrustworthy, and that the primary political energy behind hand-marked ballot advocacy traces directly to unsubstantiated 2020 fraud claims. It is genuinely difficult to fully separate the legitimate structural critique of QR-code auditability from the discredited election-denial movement that has instrumentalized it — and that association undermines the credibility of the reform at exactly the moment it needs to be taken seriously on the merits.
Liberal's hardest question
The most genuinely difficult challenge to this argument is the technical one: QR codes are not human-readable, so a voter truly cannot confirm with their own eyes that the barcode encodes their intended choices. Academic researchers at Georgia Tech have raised this as a structural auditability gap that is not answered simply by noting that audits confirmed correct tallies — if a compromised encoding were systematic, a recount of the same machine-generated barcodes would replicate the same error. That is a non-trivial concern, and dismissing it as merely downstream of 2020 denialism risks conflating the bad-faith political use of a technical critique with the technical critique itself.
Both sides agree: Both sides explicitly acknowledge that the QR-code auditability gap is a genuine structural concern raised by credible academic researchers, not merely a conspiracy theory.
The real conflict: The sides genuinely disagree on a question of values and proportionality: whether the unproven but structurally plausible risk of unverifiable QR encoding justifies the certain, immediate costs of system disruption and accessibility regression — a tradeoff neither side can resolve with the current evidence.
What nobody has answered: If a systematic QR-code encoding error would survive any recount of the same machine outputs — as both sides implicitly concede — what specific independent verification mechanism has Georgia actually deployed that would detect such an error before results are certified, and if none exists, why has neither side centered their argument on demanding one?
Sources
- Atlanta News First - 'On the Record' segment featuring Greg Dolezal (headline source)
- Georgia Secretary of State official website - voting system information
- Curling v. Raffensperger court records, U.S. District Court Northern District of Georgia
- Georgia SB 202 (2021) legislative text
- Dominion Voting Systems Georgia contract documentation (reported by Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2019)
- Georgia Secretary of State 2020 audit and recount results
- Georgia State Senate District 27 member directory