From Georgia Public Broadcasting Radio by Stephen Fowler:

As the state Senate is set to vote on a sweeping elections bill that would authorize $150 million in spending to modernize Georgia’s touchscreen direct-recording electronic voting machines, the long-term cost of the proposed solution remains a point of contention.

Unredacted proposals from six vendors who responded to the secretary of state’s request for information (RFI), an estimate done by the secretary of state’s office on hand-marked paper ballots and a separate analysis from the non-profit Open Source Elections Technology Institute show a wide range of costs and levels of specificity in where money would be spent.

HB 316 would make Georgia the only state to run elections based solely on touchscreen ballot-marking devices with a paper trail and would be paid for using bonds in the fiscal year 2020 budget starting in July. It also makes numerous changes to state election law, codifying several federal court cases and adding provisions making it easier for Georgians to vote. Opponents of the bill say that a hand-marked paper ballot option is safer against hacking and cheaper to operate.

Read the full article here.