State Rep. Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, chairman of the House Governmental Affairs Committee, speaks about Senate Bill 3EX on the floor of the House on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
The Georgia state House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday to mandate hand recounts for the top two statewide races within 0.5% and to extend the use of QR codes on ballots until 2028.
That means it only applies to positions like governor, lieutenant governor and other statewide offices, but not federal races like president.
The vote was 94 to 79.
This comes after a Georgia state House committee narrowed the scope of the controversial elections bill early Tuesday morning that otherwise would have mandated hand recounts for the top two races on a ballot under any circumstance before certification.
The recount under the current version of Senate Bill 3EX must be completed within 17 days. These changes would take effect immediately if the legislature passes the measure and it’s signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp.
The author of the bill, State Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, said it would boost voter confidence in Georgia elections.
“I think that historically we’ve used both manual counts and machine counts, and I would suggest to you that they can coexist and confirm each other’s ultimate results,” he said Monday.
Georgia state Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, present updates to SB 3EX to the Georgia House Committee on Governmental Affairs on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. The bill extends the deadline to remove QR codes from Georgia ballots but also includes an amendment that adds hand recounts of the top two races if they are within 0.5%. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
The House Governmental Affairs Committee made the changes after advocates and Democratic lawmakers raised objections to SB 3EX on Monday, saying hand recounting ballots would significantly delay election certification, lead to inaccurate results and cost taxpayers more.
“Hand counting is actually significantly more error prone and more costly than machine counting. It’s also slower, delaying the delivery of election results and risking certification problems,” said Brittany Burns, an organizer with the Black Voters Matter Fund, during Monday’s committee hearing.
Georgia Democratic lawmakers still don’t support hand counting provision
The state legislature is convening for a special session called by Kemp in part due to a 2024 elections law that bans the use of QR code ballots starting in July. Lawmakers did not manage to pass a bill during regular session this year for a replacement system.
Senate Bill 3EX would push that deadline down the road to 2028. It also provides for an advisory committee made up of members appointed by the governor, Senate Committee on Assignments and the speaker of the House that would give recommendations on a new elections system to the legislature for the 2027 legislative session.
The House committee also passed an amendment to ensure that the advisory committee gives recommendations specifically for implementing hand-marked paper ballots produced with ballot-on-demand printing.
Sen. Burns said he supports the changes to the bill on Tuesday.
“In most processes, no one party gets everything that they’d like to see, but at the end of the day I think we’ve landed at a place that makes sense for Georgia,” said Burns.
Democrats indicated on Tuesday that they are still not in support of the amended hand counting provision.
“Based on the evidence, hand recounts will inevitably get a different result from the original count, not because of fraud, but because of human error, because we’ll have thousands of people counting millions of ballots,” said state Rep. Gabriel Sanchez, D-Smyrna, who presented the minority report of the bill on the House floor.
Many Democrats said the bill aims to rehash the 2020 presidential election and plays into claims made by President Donald Trump that voting machines in Georgia inaccurately tabulated votes.
“We are spending time relitigating the 2020 election and the election denial that came from that, and we’re dressing it up as if this is election integrity. This is not it. Georgians deserve better,” said state Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Lilburn.
State Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Lilburn, speaks against SB 3EX on the floor of the House on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
Elberton Republican state Rep. Rob Leverett said if the bill fails, then hand counting will be mandatory due to the QR code deadline.
“Those who are urging a vote against this bill are going to cause the very thing they decry and disdain,” he said.
State Rep. Stacey Evans, an Atlanta Democrat, objected to the makeup of the elections advisory committee, saying it leaves Democrats out of the process.
“Why would there not be any intentional effort to make sure that the committee makeup is bipartisan as opposed to leaving it to the whims of the people that are making the proposals, not even a list of recommendations from the minority party or any sort of comparable balance?” she said during a House Rules Committee meeting.
State Rep. Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, said he trusts House Speaker Jon Burns would ensure his appointments are bipartisan. Anderson is the chairman of the House Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Honestly, I have faith in our Speaker in the House. I don’t think there’s a committee in the House, a study committee in the House that does not have bipartisan representation,” he said. “My conversation with them is that that would be appropriate, but we did not want to restrict the speaker as to who those appointments would be, and I have faith that he will exercise that appropriately as he has in the past.”
