ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — Georgia’s Joint Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee met for a third time Thursday. The committee of lawmakers is tasked with carrying out testimony and will eventually recommend a new way to cast and tabulate ballots in Georgia elections to their colleagues when the new session of the General Assembly resumes.

The third meeting focused primarily on cybersecurity around elections systems. The committee also heard from representatives of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

Testifying before the committee, Blake Evans, who has been the agency’s director of elections since 2021, told lawmakers what many already have: that no matter what system they choose, election officials and poll workers, as well as voters, need time to learn it.

“Election officials start preparing for elections years in advance, really, and it takes time on the front end to really invest the energy and effort,” Evans said. “One of the main messages we wanted to get across is whatever the method is that is chosen for the future, that we want to make sure that election officials have the time to implement it.”

What seems likely – and has been from the early stages of switching voting methods – is a move to hand marked paper ballots, where voters bubble in their selection in a race.

A recent audit conducted by the SOS office after this year’s June runoff election showed the 23 discrepancies found in that election all occurred in ballots that had been marked by hand, most of them being absentee ballots. None of the 1,079,408 ballots utilizing a touchscreen ballot-marking device showed discrepancies.

Evans told the committee that errors in a hand marked paper ballot system needs to be a consideration they make when they make their recommendations to fellow lawmakers.

“There might be some unreadable marks that the scanner just can’t pick up and there needs to be a path laid out in law for how election officials can adjudicate those ballots to best express voter intent,” he said. “Many of them will do it perfectly, and some of them might make unreadable marks and we want to make sure that for those voters that we can catch as many unreadable marks as we can.”

Lawmakers also heard from several cybersecurity experts. Some suggested lawmakers factor more frequent updates of Georgia’s election software into their appropriations process, including the iOS operating systems that function on poll worker’s iPads that help them check voters in and make sure they’re at the right voting precinct.

“How many of you have a phone that is older than three years right now?” Michael Specter, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, asked lawmakers during his testimony. “Three or four years and basically something goes wrong. So when we talk about appropriations, I would recommend the committee consider every three to four years expect to have to switch out most things.”

The committee will meet again in early October to hear from vendors of election equipment.

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