Election administrators in multiple states are wondering if they’ll have to foot millions of dollars in bills to replace voting equipment in order to comply with the Trump administration’s guidelines on elections.
An executive order by President Donald Trump last month targeted several aspects of U.S. elections, including mandating that a set of national guidelines on voting equipment be updated to ban the use of barcode-tabulated votes. Barcode tabulation is a method where vote-tabulating machines use encoded digital information like the location of a selected oval on a ballot, rather than recognizing the actual words on the ballot, to count people’s votes.
The practice has been found to be safe, secure and, importantly, fast, helping jurisdictions count votes quickly and accurately to assuage concerns about election integrity. Like many of the voting practices Trump is targeting, it’s used in both red and blue states. And as with those practices, the crackdown on barcode- and QR code-tabulated votes has left election officials scrambling to figure out if they have to change anything ahead of races in the next few months.