This is an installment in the League of Women Voters of Georgia’s “How Georgia Votes” series. To read previous installments in the “How Georgia Votes” series, follow this link.
Ask Georgians what happens to their vote after they cast it, and many will guess it disappears into a machine. It doesn’t. Every ballot cast in Georgia, whether at a polling place in Savannah or a kitchen table in Blairsville, produces a paper record that can be seen, counted, and checked. This is the fifth piece in “How Georgia Votes,” our weekly series on how Georgia elections work, and this week I want to follow that paper trail.
When you vote in person in Georgia, you make your choices on a touchscreen, and the machine prints a paper ballot. You hold that ballot in your own hands, review your selections, and feed it into a scanner yourself. The scanner tallies the vote, and the paper goes into a sealed, secure container. When you vote by mail, you mark a paper ballot directly. Either way, your vote exists on paper, and that paper is what Georgia keeps. It is stored under seal, and it is what election officials return to when the count is audited or a race is close enough to recount.
The paper ballot, to my mind, is the voter’s receipt and the state’s proof, all in one. You reviewed it. You cast it. And after Election Day, it is still there, in a sealed container in your own county, available to check the electronic count against. Machines tally the votes in Georgia, but paper is the record.
Voters who cast a mail ballot can follow it even further. Georgia lets absentee voters sign up for ballot tracking through the Secretary of State’s website, with updates as the ballot is mailed out, received back, and accepted for counting. In-person voters can confirm on the My Voter Page (mvp.sos.ga.gov) that their participation was recorded. Your ballot itself stays secret. Whether it was counted does not.
Next in our “How Georgia Votes” series: the testing every voting machine in Georgia must pass, in public, before a single vote is cast on it.
Jackie Killings is the President of the League of Women Voters of Georgia, a nonpartisan organization that encourages informed and active participation in government and never supports or opposes any candidate or political party. Learn more at lwvga.org and Vote411.org.
Monica Granderson is the President of the League of Women Voters of Marietta-Cobb County. To see information about activities of the local league, along with Cobb-specific voting and elections information, visit lwvmariettacobbga.com.