On March 25th, President Trump signed Executive Order 14248, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. The Order outlined several requirements under federal law that must be upheld: ensuring only U.S. citizens can vote, compliance with the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 (VVSG), upholding the requirement of the Elections Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting systems, and amending VVSG 2.0 to require a voter-verifiable ballot.
Expected legal challenges from Democrat Secretaries of State and non-governmental organizations have thus far netted mixed results. On April 24th, in the consolidated case League of United Latin American Citizens v. Executive Office of the President, US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly placed a temporary injunction on Sections 2(a) and 2(d), which requires citizenship proof in the national mail voter registration form and requires agencies to “assess citizenship prior to providing” a voter registration form to “enrollees of public assistance programs.”
The judge’s order let stand three sections that allowed unqualified voters to be identified and to restrict counting of ballots to those received on or before Election Day. All other sections remain in effect.
Section 4(b)(i) of the Order states that “the amended guidelines and other guidance shall provide that voting systems should not use a ballot in which a vote is contained within a barcode or quick-response code in the vote counting process…” This section will have severe consequences for several states such as Georgia, South Carolina, California, Nevada, Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and more.
All of those states, in totality or in some part, utilize ballot marking devices (BMD) that store the voter record on either a QR code or a barcode. For example, according to Verified Voting, Texas only has 12.4% hand-marked paper ballots and 87.5% BMDs. California has 59.7% hand-marked versus 40.3% BMDs.
South Carolina, home to Senator Lindsey Graham, has 0% hand-marked paper ballots and 100% BMDs. Georgia, too, is 100% BMDs.
Even worse, Louisiana in its entirety and Nevada almost exclusively (95.6%) use Direct Recording Electronic systems (DRE) which don’t have any physical ballot, but print a paper receipt to ensure you your selections were correctly tabulated.
At least one state is scurrying to figure out how to deal with the Executive Order’s requirements.
Clinton W. Lancaster, an attorney who represented President Trump in the 2020 election challenge and sued Hunter Biden for child support, had reached out to the SOS’s Office to inquire as to how they planned to comply with President Trump’s order. When his inquiry was not answered, he sent a FOIA request.
In the responsive records, some of emails allude to chaos behind the scenes in Arkansas’s Office of the Secretary of State. A lobbyist for ES&S wrote the secretary and explained that they would need to purchase Ballot On Demand (BOD) printers from ES&S. ES&S has a patent on the paper required to use the ES&S tabulators, and only their BOD printer can properly print to that paper.
In an article for Arkansas1st.com, Lancaster wrote:
Kevin Niehaus, Chief of Staff for Secretary Cole Jester, says that he does not think the state can cover the costs of all the needed printers, indicating that the Secretary’s office does not have a sufficient budget appropriation from the recently adjourned 2025 Legislative Session to purchase the BOD printers.
To that, ESS’s lobbyist seemingly admits that there is no viable solution for compliance other than ESS’s proprietary and high-cost BOD printers and that it does not have any other certifiable solution in hand. He asks, “what should ESS be thinking in terms of compliance with the requirements.” The response is telling.
Niehaus says, “at this point I’m not entirely certain. I think we are looking at a paper ballot election in Arkansas next year because there doesn’t seem to be a viable solution from ES&S and nobody is excited about that, especially Cole.”
Georgia has yet to budge despite new state law
In the controversial swing state of Georgia, officials are dragging their feet to implement hand-marked paper ballots, as required in the Order. But Georgia is double-dipping in their defiance: the Georgia legislature passed Senate Bill 181 in May of 2024 that required QR codes no longer be used to tabulate votes.
Section 7 of SB181 reads:
The official tabulation count of any ballot scanner shall be based upon the text portion or the machine mark, provided that such mark clearly denotes the elector’s selection and does use a QR code, bar code, or similar coding, of such ballots and not any machine coding that may be printed on such ballots.
But just like the aftermath of Dr. J Alex Halderman’s explosive report and testimony in federal court detailing and demonstrating severe vulnerabilities in the state’s voting system while urging Georgia officials to at least perform security updates, Georgia election officials have ignored that advice, the law, and the executive order.
