As the Verified Voting article “Decoding Your Ballot” makes clear, QR codes and barcodes are useful for identifying ballot styles and precincts—but when it comes to encoding actual votes, they fall short of the transparency voters deserve. 

That’s why Hart InterCivic has never stored or tabulated votes using barcodes or QR codes. Our systems are built on a simple but powerful principle: voters should be able to read and verify their selections — and know that what they see is what gets counted. 

“Hart’s ballots are tabulated by scanners using patented Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the human-readable text printed on the ballot,” said Jim Canter, Chief Technology Officer at Hart InterCivic. “QR codes and barcodes make sense for ballot styles, but they shouldn’t be used to encode votes. Voters should be able to read their BMD-printed vote selections and review what the tabulator will scan to count their votes.” 

The recent Executive Order from the White House reinforces this approach, mandating that ballots used in U.S. elections must not contain votes encoded in barcodes or QR codes. This is a win for transparency, voter confidence, and election integrity. 

At Hart, we don’t wait for mandates to do the right thing. We build our systems with the voter in mind—because democracy deserves nothing less. 

Hart’s Verity® and Vanguard™ systems already meet this standard. Our ballot marking devices print selections in plain text, and our tabulators read exactly what the voter sees—no translation, no hidden codes, no ambiguity.  

We applaud Verified Voting for helping voters understand the risks of barcode-based vote encoding and for highlighting the importance of voter-verifiable paper trails. At Hart, we’re proud to say: we’ve been doing it right all along. 

For more information, visit Hart’s recent article, “Hart and Barcodes – Doing the Right Thing“.