Lawmakers who want to overhaul the way Georgians vote heard a consistent message Thursday from election chiefs.

Hurry up! And give us money.

A law backed by Republicans in the General Assembly outlaws the Quick Response (QR) codes that the state’s voting machines use to transfer voter intent into each polling place’s database.

Poll workers will have to use a different method starting July 1, and the legislature has yet to identify it — or pay for it.

Local election chiefs and poll workers told a House study committee that convened at Savannah Technical College Thursday that they will need months to train workers.

“It cannot be rushed,” said Billy Wooten, the election supervisor in Chatham County, where the fourth hearing of the House study committee on election procedures was being held.

There is significant momentum in the state Republican party to use paper ballots.

Such a change could be expensive for a small place like Irwin County, said Ethan Compton, the election supervisor there.

“Property taxes will have to go up if we have to pre-print all of our ballots,” he said. “That is a cost that is going to be unacceptable to the people that I work for.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who announced this week that he is running for governor, has consistently said that the state’s voting machines work well and that elections have been accurate.

But a statistician from the University of California at Berkeley who was invited to speak, said Georgia’s system can be hacked. Professor Philip Stark also said the system lacks a paper trail that is trustworthy enough for reliable audits.

He recommended that the state use hand-marked ballots like most voters in the country. The results would be optically scanned on election night for a prompt result, then workers would do hand counts to confirm the outcome.

Instead, Georgia voters mark their vote on a touchscreen, and the machine then transfers the result to a printout bearing the selections and a QR code. The voter then enters the paper into a secured scanner. The ballot machine also produces a digital record on a memory card that each voter returns after using it to record their vote.

The system is known as a ballot marking device.

“With a ballot marking device, you’re making the voter responsible not just for their own mistakes, but also for the cybersecurity of the system,” Stark said. “It’s on them to determine whether the system misbehaved and misprinted their votes.”

With this kind of system, voters lack proof if a machine errs, he said. “It doesn’t give them any evidence that they can go back to a poll worker and say, ‘Hey, this machine flipped my vote’.”

About two dozen members of the public each got a moment to speak, some saying they lacked confidence in the election system and others endorsing it. So much information was shared during the four-hour hearing that the last speaker said she forgot what she was going to say.

Before her, Marilyn Marks, the director of the Coalition for Good Governance, told the lawmakers something that probably everyone could agree with despite the controversy surrounding elections and voting.

“You guys have your work cut out for you,” she said.

Capitol Beat is a nonprofit news service operated by the Georgia Press Educational Foundation that provides coverage of state government to newspapers throughout Georgia. For more information visit capitol-beat.org.

The next hearing will be Oct. 2 at the Georgia Piedmont Technical College campus in Covington.