QR codes are at the center of the latest conspiracy theory in Georgia’s elections. And it’s largely thanks to Garland Favorito, a man who has spent decades trying to get people to listen to his conspiracy theories about insecure voting machines being used to rig elections in Georgia.

When Georgia became the epicenter of election denial conspiracy theories in 2020, Favorito became an overnight superstar in the election denial community, and an integral part of the vast network of groups across the country that sprang up to promote the baseless claim that US elections are rigged. In Georgia, he claimed that the use of QR codes on ballots could rig elections. In 2024, the state legislature approved a bill banning their use.

“It's a complete red herring, but it's being used to symbolize a fear of election fraud,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of Georgia’s State Election Board, tells WIRED. “The folks who are desperate to remove the QR codes think that our elections are vulnerable, that they're being hacked or being rigged, that fraud is rampant and widespread.”

Now, with six months to go to the midterms elections, lawmakers in Georgia have failed to approve a system to replace the QR codes. Favorito and his allies are using this opportunity to push for the removal of voting machines entirely, a key demand of election conspiracy theorists who have long claimed that nefarious forces have used the machines to rig elections against President Donald Trump.

These conspiracy theories go back many years. In 2019, Georgia introduced a new election system, spending $107 million on new Dominion voting machines. The new system had voters use a touchscreen to make their selections rather than hand-marking their ballots. Once completed, the machine spits out a paper ballot that includes both a human-readable summary of their selections and a QR code that encodes the same information. Voters can check that their selections have been recorded accurately before feeding the ballot into a tabulator, which reads the QR code to count the votes.

Critics of the use of QR codes—which include everyone from election deniers to computer scientists—claim that because humans cannot read the digital code, there is no way of knowing that the results encoded in it are the same as those printed on the ballot.

While most critics admit there is no evidence that they have been used successfully to rig elections, Favorito has claimed otherwise.

Favorito, who has boosted a wide variety of conspiracy theories—including claims that Israel was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and that the family of George W. Bush was involved in the JFK assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan—officially got involved in the war on QR codes in August 2021, when he filed a lawsuit seeking to ban them from Georgia’s elections. While the lawsuit went nowhere, the baseless claim that QR codes had somehow been used to rig the outcome of the 2020 election stuck, and by 2024 the Georgia state legislature passed a massive election bill that included the banning of QR codes to tabulate votes.

Ben Adida, the executive director of VotingWorks, a bipartisan nonprofit group that builds open-source voting systems and election auditing software, says there was absolutely no reason for QR codes to be banned. “Georgia runs post-election audits based on the human-readable text, so QR codes or other machine encoding of voter choices are not a security risk for Georgia elections,” says Adida, who also worked on an audit in Georgia after the 2020 election.

When WIRED asked Favorito if, despite all the audits and investigations that found no evidence of fraud, he still believed the 2020 election was rigged using QR codes, Favorito responded: “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

Georgia’s bill did not outline what system should replace the QR codes, but it set a July 1, 2026 deadline to end the use of the codes. The effort to demonize QR codes was given added impetus when in March 2025 Trump signed an executive order demanding that the Election Assistance Commission approve new rules to ban the counting of votes via QR codes in most cases nationwide. The commission did not respond to a request for comment.

Since then, legislators in Georgia have repeatedly failed to put in place a system to replace QR codes or update the election systems. So with just six months to go before the midterms, election directors in counties across the state have been left in limbo, unsure how to proceed or whether new rules will be put in place.

When asked how the ballots will be counted in the midterms, Anne Dover, director of elections in Cherokee County, tells WIRED: “Unfortunately, we do not have an answer to this question.”

Some believe that Governor Brian Kemp will recall the legislature for a special session designed specifically to address the issue. Kemp declined to comment, and spokesperson Carter Chapman referred WIRED to a statement he made in early April after the legislature ended without a new system in place, where the office stated that they were working on it.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, also declined to comment on how this situation would be fixed, but spokesperson Michon Lindstrom said the office had “full confidence in our election officials that they will be able to carry out a successful election.”

Last month, Raffensperger’s office proposed a temporary workaround that would use QR codes to count votes on election night in order to provide instant results, but optical-character-recognition scanning technology would then be used on the ballots for the legal count—though experts have said this method could be illegal.

Georgia law does allow for the use of hand-marked paper ballots in case of emergencies, such as power cuts, but it is not a system that was designed for use by the entire voting population.

For Favorito however, the solution is simple: Remove voting machines entirely. “Publicly recorded hand counts so that you can be assured that there is no cheating,” he says.

He also dismissed evidence that shows machine counting is not only faster but more accurate and cheaper. When asked who would carry out the task of counting millions of ballots, Favorito suggested that “volunteers and students” could be used.

While Favorito says that a hand-counted system like this can be put in place in time for the 2026 midterms, those on the frontlines who administer elections say that is simply unworkable.

“Hand counting is serious,” says Deidre Holden, director of elections in Paulding County. “We need individuals that are committed and understand that what they are handling is someone’s voice. Not just a piece of paper that needs to be counted. There would be a struggle to find these student volunteers. We already struggle to find committed poll workers, and they are paid.”

Another issue is the sheer volume of distinct ballots that would have to be printed and correctly handed out to voters on election day. And for the already under-resourced election officials across Georgia who are trying to prepare for an election season, the lack of clarity is deeply frustrating.

“We are at the mercy of the legislators,” says Dover, the director of elections in Cherokee County. “This is not our problem to solve. The legislators created this problem.”