Election administrators in multiple states are wondering if they’ll have to foot millions of dollars in bills to replace voting equipment in order to comply with the Trump administration’s guidelines on elections.
An executive order by President Donald Trump last month targeted several aspects of U.S. elections, including mandating that a set of national guidelines on voting equipment be updated to ban the use of barcode-tabulated votes. Barcode tabulation is a method where vote-tabulating machines use encoded digital information like the location of a selected oval on a ballot, rather than recognizing the actual words on the ballot, to count people’s votes.
The practice has been found to be safe, secure and, importantly, fast, helping jurisdictions count votes quickly and accurately to assuage concerns about election integrity. Like many of the voting practices Trump is targeting, it’s used in both red and blue states. And as with those practices, the crackdown on barcode- and QR code-tabulated votes has left election officials scrambling to figure out if they have to change anything ahead of races in the next few months.
“We do have some concerns, because in Utah some counties use voting machines that produce a ballot that has a barcode on it,” Ricky Hatch, the county clerk for Weber County, Utah, told NOTUS. “If we had to replace all of our equipment, it would probably cost, I’m guessing, $25 million to buy new equipment.”
For states where almost every jurisdiction would have to replace equipment, the estimate is even higher. In Georgia, a state bill that passed last year and stripped ballots of QR codes and barcodes was priced at $300 million.
In Delaware, Georgia and South Carolina, all votes are counted using vote-encoding ballot-marking devices, according to Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, an organization that advocates for responsible technology use in elections. In at least 15 other states, at least some jurisdictions use the devices, including large areas that see millions of voters each election, he said.
Experts have said that replacing these devices with other voting equipment that doesn’t use barcode or QR code tabulation could cost jurisdictions massive amounts of money and slow the vote-counting process.
The executive order makes exceptions for voters with disabilities and says election officials can continue to allow those voters to use machines that employ barcode tabulation. But this could pose its own issues around voting privacy, especially in smaller precincts that may have a small number of voters with disabilities, said Alan Hays, the election commissioner in Lake County, Florida. If only one person with a disability voted on a given day, their ballot would stand out, compromising the secrecy of their vote, he said.
Following that part of the executive order could also lead into dicey legal territory for election workers, Lindeman said, because “it’s almost certainly illegal for poll workers to ask someone, ‘Do you have a disability?’ and to restrict your access to ballot-marking devices based on your answer to that question.”
There are also several questions swirling about who the order applies to, and how, if at all, it’d be enforced in the near future. The power to enforce the barcode provision of the executive order seemingly lies with the Election Assistance Commission, an independent government agency that oversees election administration.
The problem, Lindeman said, is that the commission hasn’t even fully started using the newest version of its guidelines to certify existing equipment. It’s unlikely that the commission could certify voting systems across the nation to meet the requirements of these new guidelines and also take additional steps to ensure that no barcodes are used, much less do so before the end of the 180-day timeline the executive order sets, he added.
“This, in the short run, would leave states with nothing they could adopt,” Lindeman said.
That could lead to states’ election equipment certification processes hanging in limbo. It also likely means that nothing will fundamentally change about how elections are administered in 2025 or 2026 — but that doesn’t negate the “mystification about what this [order] could even do,” he said.
Trump’s order mentions barcode- and QR code-encoded votes, but doesn’t make any mention of barcodes that simply encode metadata about ballots like what precinct a ballot is for. Some states that don’t use voting equipment that encodes actual votes in barcodes or QR codes still use barcodes for this type of metadata, including Nebraska. But Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen said he’s confident that they’re in a good place in terms of compliance and that the order will benefit them.
“The executive order opens up federal databases that will help states gain access in an efficient way so that we can confirm the citizenship status of registrants,” Evnen said, adding that he also supports other provisions of the executive order like its restrictions on when mail-in ballots can be counted.
Election companies have also defended Trump’s order. Hart InterCivic, a private company that provides election technology to jurisdictions in at least 13 states, released a statement last week backing the directive.
“We believe that electronic ballot marking devices must capture voters’ choices using the same method that voters used to verify their choices — by reading the plain text on the ballot,” the statement said. “No Hart voting system has ever hidden voter choices in unreadable barcodes or QR codes.”
Trump’s executive order also makes multiple references to paper ballots and records, which the president has claimed prevents “fraud or mistake” more than digital voting technology. But many machines that use barcode tabulation already also provide verifiable paper records, rendering some parts of the order redundant when compared to existing procedures.
For some election accessibility advocates, this redundancy is a signal that this executive order is more than just a good-faith attempt at election security.
“It’s not a long walk from saying, ‘OK, all the ballot machines you have now aren’t certified,’” said Barbara Warner, the executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute and a former Oregon state representative. “If you’re trying to figure out a way to make it so that next year’s election either doesn’t happen or can be ignored or sidestepped, that’s the kind of stuff you do.”
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.