From a voter’s perspective, the process of casting a ballot during advance voting or on Election Day will appear the most similar. For purposes of tabulation; however, advance voting ballots and vote-by-mail ballots are more similar. To better understand why that is, a brief overview of how a ballot is cast is provided below. In either case, the adoption of ballot-marking devices and ballot scanners now means that Georgia will always have a paper backup of each vote cast, regardless of the kind of ballot that is used by a voter. All these ballots are run through optical scanning equipment to tabulate votes.
Voters casting a ballot during advance voting (i.e., casting a ballot in person before Election Day) or on Election Day will make ballot selections on a touchscreen and then be asked to confirm their selections. Once confirmed, the ballot-marking device will use an off-the-shelf printer to produce a paper ballot that will include the voter’s selections and a QR code (see figure 1). [1] The voter will then walk their ballot over to a ballot scanner station and deposit the paper into a ballot scanner (see figure 2). It is this last step that constitutes casting a ballot. See “2021 Ga. Poll Worker Manual” at 62.
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Figure 1: After making ballot selections on the ballot-marking device, a voter is reviewing her ballot that was printed out by an off-the-shelf printer. Credit: 2021 Ga. Poll Worker Manual | Georgia Secretary of State.
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Figure 2: Ballot scanners. Credit: 2021 Ga. Poll Worker Manual | Georgia Secretary of State.
Each polling place is also required to have a “sufficient number of blank paper ballots that can be marked by pen … in the event of an emergency.” Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 183-1-12-.01. That reference to “blank paper ballots” might sound redundant because all ballots now involve a piece of paper that is then placed into a scanner, but in this case, the “blank paper ballots” refers to preprinted ballots, whereas the ballots created by the ballot-marking devices might be thought of as print-on-demand ballots.
Unlike Election Day ballots that are printed on demand by the ballot-marking devices, vote-by-mail ballots are printed in bulk by the county (or a vendor). See e.g., Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 183-1-14-.11. They are then mailed to the voter who completes the ballot by hand, and then mails the ballot back inside an inner secrecy envelope that is placed in an outer envelope. Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 183-1-14-.11. That vote-by-mail ballot will be pre-processed (as described in Early Absentee Ballot Processing Board) and eventually placed into a scanner at a central tabulation center by personnel authorized to do so by the Election Superintendent. O.C.G.A. § 21-2-386(a)(2)(A).