QR Code Conspiracy Theory Sparks Chaos Before Georgia Midterms
▼ Summary
– Garland Favorito has promoted baseless conspiracy theories for decades, claiming QR codes on ballots in Georgia can rig elections.
– In 2024, Georgia’s legislature passed a bill banning QR codes for vote tabulation, despite no evidence of fraud.
– Critics, including computer scientists, argue QR codes are a security risk because humans cannot read the encoded results to verify accuracy.
– Election officials and voting system experts say QR codes pose no risk, as Georgia audits rely on human-readable text, not the codes.
– Favorito and allies now push to remove all voting machines, exploiting the lack of a replacement system for QR codes before the midterms.
QR codes have become the latest flashpoint in Georgia’s election security debate, fueled largely by veteran conspiracy theorist Garland Favorito, who has spent years pushing unsubstantiated claims that voting machines are vulnerable to rigging. When Georgia emerged as a national hotspot for election denial narratives following the 2020 presidential race, Favorito’s influence skyrocketed. He became a key figure in a sprawling network of groups dedicated to spreading the baseless assertion that U.S. elections are systematically manipulated.
At the center of his current crusade is the QR code printed on Georgia’s paper ballots. Favorito has long argued that these codes, which encode a voter’s selections in a machine-readable format, could be altered without detection. That argument gained enough traction that the Georgia state legislature passed a bill in 2024 banning their use for vote tabulation.
Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of Georgia’s State Election Board, calls the entire controversy a distraction. “It’s a complete red herring, but it’s being used to symbolize a fear of election fraud,” she 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 only six months remaining before the midterm elections, lawmakers have yet to approve a replacement system for the QR codes. Favorito and his allies are seizing this window to push for the complete elimination of voting machines, a long-standing goal of election denial activists who insist that Dominion machines were used to rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
The controversy traces back to 2019, when Georgia rolled out a $107 million voting system from Dominion. Instead of hand-marking paper ballots, voters now use a touchscreen to make their choices. The machine then prints a ballot displaying both a human-readable summary and a QR code that encodes the same information. Voters can verify their selections before feeding the ballot into a tabulator, which reads the QR code to tally votes.
Critics, including some computer scientists as well as election deniers, argue that because humans cannot read QR codes directly, there is no way to confirm the encoded results match what appears in plain text. Still, most acknowledge there is no evidence that QR codes have ever been used to successfully alter an election outcome. Favorito, however, insists otherwise.
His involvement in the QR code fight began in August 2021, when he filed a lawsuit seeking to ban them from Georgia elections. The suit went nowhere, but the narrative stuck. By 2024, the legislature responded with a sweeping election bill that outlawed QR codes for tabulation.
Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks, a bipartisan nonprofit that develops open-source voting systems, says the ban was unnecessary. “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 helped audit the state’s 2020 election results. The audits, he notes, rely on the printed text voters can see and verify, not the QR codes.
(Source: Wired)
