AlterNet: Why Trump wants to ban barcodes on ballots -- and why it's an urgent threat

[Dennis Donovan]

AlterNet - Why Trump wants to ban barcodes on ballots — and why it's an urgent threat

Jessica Huseman, Votebeat
March 29, 2025

President Donald Trump’s new executive order on regulating elections is striking for the way it asserts broad powers for the executive branch that go far beyond what’s prescribed in the Constitution or sanctioned by courts. Experts expect the order to face legal challenges for that reason.

/snip/

But what’s also striking about the order is how it seeks to dictate some arcane details of the way voting systems work in some of America: Specifically, it bans the machine-readable barcodes or QR codes that are sometimes printed on ballots to help speed up vote counting.

Trump framed this move as a return to secure, paper-based voting. But in reality, the vast majority of Americans already use paper-based systems to vote, and barcodes and QR codes are an integral part of some of those systems. Getting rid of them as quickly as Trump envisions could create confusion, hassles, and steep costs for the jurisdictions that use them, which include some of America’s largest cities. It would slow down vote counts, and wouldn’t necessarily improve their accuracy.

So the language of the Trump order naturally raises questions about how barcodes and QR codes are used in our voting systems, and why the administration is directly targeting these codes as an urgent threat to election security and integrity.

Here’s a closer look at some of those questions:

/snip

[Walleye]

1. Because they didn't have barcodes back when racists were running America like he wants us to return to

[GreenWave]

2. If it messes up big blue cities, of course trump wants to do it.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[boonecreek]

4. Trump's order isn't worth the paper it's scribbled on.

Here's what J.B. Pritzker had to say about it.

[John Farmer]

5. Getting rid of bar codes

would drastically slow down voting and vote counting.

Many voting precincts cover multiple voting districts. Bar codes are how election personnel keep them all straight and avoid giving the wrong ballots to voters.