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A cautious session trips over its own election
by Tom BaxterApril 6, 2026 6:08 pm
If there were no other way to tell this was an election-year session, you could have guessed from a Senate amendment that made its way onto a House bill as the General Assembly neared Sine Die last week.
Quickly dubbed the “Epstein Amendment” in the halls, it essentially says that any settlements involving claims made on or after Jan. 1, 2019, against a member of the General Assembly for “an unlawful employment practice,” including sexual and discriminatory harassment, are to be made public, along with the name of the member. That sounded specific enough to set off speculation about which candidate it was aimed at.
Some election-year sessions are all about drawing sharp lines and piling up ammunition for upcoming campaigns. The Epstein amendment notwithstanding, this was not that kind of session, and that could be an indication of the kind of election year this could be.
Red meat bills related to guns or elections did not fare well in this session, but neither did the armada of bills launched on the promise of doing something about data centers. The income tax cut that passed was the more measured approach favored by our lame duck governor, not the lieutenant governor’s more vote-hungry measure. Caution was the word of the day, for good and ill.
This session exuded a collective desire to be seen as getting down to business for the voters and not getting caught up in pointless partisan jousts. If there was one bill that reflected this session’s good intentions, it was the Georgia Property Owners Bill of Rights Act, which sets up a regulatory process under the Secretary of State for homeowners’ associations.
This bill was both bipartisan and biracial in sponsorship, and it concerned an issue that inspires passionate opinions, yet has nothing to do with party politics. A sweet spot, in other words, for lawmakers casting wider nets in a year when a lot is at play.
The great irony is that this comparatively prudent election-year session got all the way to 1 a.m. Friday morning, without settling the issue of the election itself.
Under a law passed in a less cautious moment in 2024, ballots with QR codes, like those used by Dominion voting machines, can’t be used after July 1 of this year. Not only the ballots but the machines in the $107 million system will have to be replaced. The money to buy a new system never got appropriated, so the House passed a bill that would put off the change until 2028. It wasn’t taken up in the Senate before it adjourned in the early hours of Friday.
This almost inevitably means a special session will be required if we want to hold elections this fall, but the timing, with the primaries and the World Cup in the way, is difficult and the prospect of hearings filled with all kinds of voting-related conspiracy theories has to be daunting. The alternative to legislating a delay, since no one thinks it’s possible to switch to a new system in a matter of months, is to open the door to a mess of lawsuits.
The legislation which has caused this — setting a hard deadline to make expensive changes to fix problems no one has proven exist — was trumpeted a couple of years ago as a measure that would improve voter integrity. Instead, this confusion over a QR code has created new uncertainties in a year when there will be many of those.
Tom Baxter has written about politics and the South for more than four decades. He was national editor and chief political correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and later edited The Southern... More by Tom Baxter