By Joe Johnson
The Georgia Secretary of State’s office reportedly is investigating a Winterville man’s election day ballot complaint.
According to an Athens-Clarke County police report, the 53-year-old voter said that after casting his ballot Tuesday morning with a touchscreen machine at the Winterville polling station, the machine printed a piece of paper with just a QR code on it, not the candidates for whom he voted.
The man said that state law requires cast ballots to be legible, so he asked poll workers to print out the QR code, but they refused and told him that the code was the ballot, according to the report.
He next went to Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections and then the Secretary of State’s office in Atlanta and was told at both locations that the QR code could not be printed out and was admonished for leaving his polling station with the ballot, according to the police report.
The frustrated voter next went to the Winterville Police Department, where he was told that the department would not open an investigation, the report indicated.
He then went to the Clarke County Sheriff’s Office, which referred him to ACCPD, according to the report, where an officer called the Secretary of State’s office and spoke to a supervisor who said that they were opening an investigation into the man’s complaints.