GoKawiilQR codes are at the center of the latest conspiracy theory in Georgia’s elections. And it’s largely thanks to Garland Favorito, a man who has spent decades trying to get people to listen to his conspiracy theories about insecure voting machines being used to rig elections in Georgia.
When Georgia became the epicenter of election denial conspiracy theories in 2020, Favorito became an overnight superstar in the election denial community, and an integral part of the vast network of groups across the country that sprang up to promote the baseless claim that US elections are rigged. In Georgia, he claimed that the use of QR codes on ballots could rig elections. In 2024, the state legislature approved a bill banning their use.
“It's a complete red herring, but it's being used to symbolize a fear of election fraud,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of Georgia’s State Election Board, 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 six months to go to the midterms elections, lawmakers in Georgia have failed to approve a system to replace the QR codes. Favorito and his allies are using this opportunity to push for the removal of voting machines entirely, a key demand of election conspiracy theorists who have long claimed that nefarious forces have used the machines to rig elections against President Donald Trump.
These conspiracy theories go back many years. In 2019, Georgia introduced a new election system, spending $107 million on new Dominion voting machines. The new system had voters use a touchscreen to make their selections rather than hand-marking their ballots. Once completed, the machine spits out a paper ballot that includes both a human-readable summary of their selections and a QR code that encodes the same information. Voters can check that their selections have been recorded accurately before feeding the ballot into a tabulator, which reads the QR code to count the votes.
Critics of the use of QR codes—which include everyone from election deniers to computer scientists—claim that because humans cannot read the digital code, there is no way of knowing that the results encoded in it are the same as those printed on the ballot.
While most critics admit there is no evidence that they have been used successfully to rig elections, Favorito has claimed otherwise.
Favorito, who has boosted a wide variety of conspiracy theories—including claims that Israel was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and that the family of George W. Bush was involved in the JFK assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan—officially got involved in the war on QR codes in August 2021, when he filed a lawsuit seeking to ban them from Georgia’s elections. While the lawsuit went nowhere, the baseless claim that QR codes had somehow been used to rig the outcome of the 2020 election stuck, and by 2024 the Georgia state legislature passed a massive election bill that included the banning of QR codes to tabulate votes.
Ben Adida, the executive director of VotingWorks, a bipartisan nonprofit group that builds open-source voting systems and election auditing software, says there was absolutely no reason for QR codes to be banned. “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 also worked on an audit in Georgia after the 2020 election.