Month: October 2025

October 16, 2025 — South Georgia

Sam Carnline, co-founder of GeorgiansForTruth.org, delivered a petition today to the Georgia House Blue Ribbon Study Committee on Election Procedures calling for the state to adopt hand-marked paper ballots, publicly hand-counted at the precinct on Election Day. The petition, drawing on findings and testimony outlined in recent election-security presentations and filings, urges lawmakers to move away from barcode-based ballot marking devices and toward a fully auditable system grounded in voter-marked paper.

Carnline, a Grady County resident, thanked representatives for holding hearings across the state, noting the importance of bringing the process closer to affected communities. “Thank you, representatives, for holding this around the state. We really appreciate coming down here to South Georgia,” he said, adding with a local touch: “Down in Grady County, and like the rest of the world around here, we grow peanuts, cotton and pine trees. And you can do a lot of paper ballots from Georgia pine trees right here in the South, and we’d be glad to provide them.”

He emphasized that the petition summarizes expert assessments of security and auditability challenges in Georgia’s current voting system and makes a simple request: “It’s a petition to go to hand marked paper ballots and we’d love to see them counted at the precinct on Election Day.”

Carnline also voiced concern about ongoing vendor consolidation and branding changes in the election technology market, urging lawmakers not to mistake corporate reshuffling for substantive security reform. Using a pointed analogy, he said: “If I go out here in the parking lot and I get a Toyota and I pull the badge off of it and put it over on a Ford—does that make that Ford a Toyota? It does not. And that’s what we’re being asked to accept here.” He added, “I just don’t trust voting machines. We want to get rid of electronic voting in our state.”

Underscoring his skepticism about retrofitting current systems to resolve foundational vulnerabilities, Carnline cited the repeated warnings of experts who, he said, have testified that the system cannot be hardened to the necessary standard. “You’ve had expert after expert tell y’all that it can’t be modified to be a secure system,” he said, driving back to his core recommendation: “Hand marked paper ballots counted at the precinct.”

Carnline closed with a homespun turn of phrase to argue against patching the status quo: “My dad used to say… you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken scratch. And that’s what we’re being asked to do with Dominion.”

The petition calls for:

• Hand-marked paper ballots for all in-person voters, with accessible options maintained.
• Public, precinct-level hand counts on election night with immediate posting of results and robust reconciliation.
• A statutory bar on QR/barcode-based tabulation and other unverifiable ballot representations.
• Expanded transparency for ballot records and chain-of-custody documentation.
• Stronger, independent cybersecurity governance and controls beyond vendor assurances.

Committee members acknowledged receipt of the petition. As the statewide listening tour continues, Carnline’s remarks encapsulate a growing constituency pressing for election processes that are simple, observable, and locally auditable: “Hand marked paper ballots counted at the precinct. Thank you very much.”

What Was Analyzed

• 10,768 total ballots
• ~366,112 ballot positions (about 34 per ballot)
• 11 Grady County SLOG files from ICP precinct scanners (Cairo 5, Higdon, Pine Park, Midway, Spence, AV2, Blowing Cave, Cairo 4, Whigham, AV1, Woodland)

A “ballot position” is a single choice on a ballot—like a candidate selection or a yes/no on a referendum.

The Headline: Error Rate Far Above Federal Targets

The report identifies 6,317 machine-logged errors across four categories, affecting 58.66% of all ballots. When measured against the federal target error rate of 1 error per 10,000,000 ballot positions, the observed rate is 1 error per 58 positions—about 0.0173%.¹ That’s approximately 172,543 times higher than the Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) target referenced in federal law at 52 U.S.C. § 21081 (often cited as “1 in 10,000,000” under the Help America Vote Act’s performance metrics).

Primary error types found:

• “Ballot has been reversed” — 2,908 instances (46.03% of all errors)
• “Ballot format or ID is unrecognizable” — 1,776 instances (28.11%)
• “Could not find QR code on ballot” — 1,349 instances (21.36%)
• “QR code Signature mismatch” — 284 instances (4.50%)

While that last category is the smallest by count, it has outsized significance because of how similar QR code-related defects have played out in real elections.

Zooming In: The QR Code “Signature Mismatch” Error

The report flags 284 “QR code Signature mismatch” errors across the 10,768 ballots (roughly 366,112 ballot positions). Errors of this class have a documented history in other jurisdictions. According to the report, this same defect was identified in Tennessee, acknowledged by Dominion and the EAC, and led the Tennessee Secretary of State to recommend discontinuing use of the affected system. The EAC’s official “Report of Investigation: Dominion D‑Suite 5.5‑B” explains how QR misreads on ImageCast Precinct (ICP) tabulators could mark ballots as provisional and fail to reset, causing downstream reporting mismatches. The EAC and Dominion validated the problem and approved engineering changes in March 2022 to address it.

In Grady County’s dataset, the QR code error is heavily concentrated: 221 of the 284 instances (77.8%) occur in a single file (AV1.pdf), with the remaining 63 spread across eight others. Two files (Pine Park.pdf, Spence.pdf) show zero instances of this specific error.

Why this matters: even when a central count or canvass ultimately reconciles the totals, precinct-level poll reports can misstate scanned ballot counts on the devices affected during Election Day—undermining transparency at the point where voters and poll workers expect accurate end-of-day reporting.

Constitutional and Legal Context Raised by the Report

The presentation’s conclusions explicitly connect these findings to:

• Federal standards: The report states the observed error rate deviates sharply from the EAC’s benchmark and concludes the system “FAILS EAC STANDARD.”
• Georgia Constitution Article II, Section I, Paragraph I (“Elections by the people shall be by secret ballot and shall be conducted in accordance with procedures provided by law.”): The authors argue the system, as deployed, does not meet minimum standards and is therefore “in contravention” of the Constitution’s method-of-voting clause.

It’s worth noting the presentation asserts “No change since deployed in 2020, even after known issues reported,” which, if accurate, raises oversight and certification questions—especially in light of the EAC’s earlier acknowledgment of QR-code defects and Tennessee’s response.

The Call to Action Presented to Lawmakers

At the October 16, 2025 hearing, commenters echoed and amplified the report’s implications, stating:

• “For 23 years, Georgia has lived under an unconstitutional voting system. From Diebold to Dominion, we’ve had a black box, proprietary system that has not met minimum standards and has been in contravention of Georgia Constitution Article II, Section I, Paragraph I—Method of Voting.”
• “Federal law mandates a maximum of 1 error per 10,000,000 ballot positions under 53 USC 21081 (5).”
• “In the 2024 Grady County general election, there were 284 QR code Signature mismatch errors in 10,768 ballots (~366,112 ballot positions). This was determined by examining 11 SLOG files from the ICP tabulators.”
• “The QR code Signature mismatch error was found in Tennessee and confirmed by the Elections Assistance Commission and Dominion. The TN SOS recommended disconnecting use of the system. Georgia must do the same. Investigate the impact to the statewide elections in 2024 and 2025. Discontinue use of the system until recertified to meet federal election standards.”
• “To preserve Georgia’s constitutionality and comply with federal requirements, defer use of Dominion (Liberty Vote) in federal elections.”
• “Return sovereignty of our elections back to the people, not the machines or the corporations. Let’s go back to hand marked hand counted paper ballots NOW!”

These statements mirror the presentation’s “Considerations for Further Review” and its concluding recommendations: pause use of the system in federal elections, investigate the broader statewide impact in 2024–2025, and require recertification to federal standards before redeployment.

What This Means for Public Confidence

Precision and transparency are the currency of election legitimacy. Even when back-end redundancy (like central count systems or hand tallies) recovers the correct totals, visible discrepancies at the precinct level introduce confusion and doubt for poll workers, watchers, candidates, and voters. When those discrepancies scale beyond federal performance targets, the public reasonably asks whether the system, as configured and certified, is meeting its obligations.

The Grady County analysis doesn’t claim that outcomes were flipped. Instead, it documents a high incidence of machine-logged errors relative to federal targets, a known and previously investigated QR-code defect class, and evidence that precinct-level reporting can go awry when specific tabulators encounter those conditions. Combined, these findings justify the requests for investigation, immediate risk-limiting policy responses, and a rigorous recertification path.

A Path Forward

• Investigate the 2024 and 2025 elections statewide with a particular focus on precinct-level SLOGs and QR-code handling behaviors.
• Require evidence of conformity with EAC performance thresholds before redeployment.
• Consider operational mitigations: expanded parallel testing, real-time anomaly detection, and contingency workflows for precincts that encounter QR-related errors.
• Evaluate alternatives that honor Georgia’s constitutional requirements and maximize public verifiability—up to and including hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots where practical and procedurally sound.

The central promise of elections is not just that the math adds up at the end—it’s that every step along the way is auditable, understandable, and compliant with law. Grady County’s logs are a timely reminder that the details inside our systems matter, and that restoring trust requires not only correct results, but also systems that demonstrably meet the standards the law—and the people—demand.

Field Searcy is co-founder of GeorgiansForTruth.org, a grassroots volunteer effort to bring election integrity to Georgia. Visit for more information and supporting documentation.

¹ Election Assistance Commission. (2002). Voting system standards: Volume I: Performance standards (Section 3.2.1: Accuracy requirements, pp. 3-51–3-52). U.S. Federal Election Commission.https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/28/Voting_System_Standards_Volume_I.pdf