# Hand-Marked Paper Ballot A **hand-marked paper ballot** is a ballot the voter fills in with a pen, as distinct from one produced by a [[Ballot Marking Device]], which prints the voter's selections as text and usually a barcode. The distinction is the whole subject of ballot-mark validity: a hand-marked ballot can be ambiguous and a device-printed one cannot, so every state rule about partial fills, check marks, circled names and stray marks applies to the first kind and is inert as to the second. This is why the mark-validity question is not uniform even inside one state. Georgia's own rule writes separate provisions for the two, and its scanner-threshold percentages apply by their terms to "optical scan ballots marked by hand." A jurisdiction that runs ballot-marking devices in the polling place and hand-marked paper by mail is applying two different legal regimes to the two piles of its own election — see [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]]. Expand with: the security and auditability debate between hand-marked paper and device-marked paper, the share of American jurisdictions using each, and the barcode-versus-text question that Georgia postponed to 2028. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-06 ASCII map build for [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]] - [[Ballot Marking Device]] - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] - [[Voter Intent]] - [[How a Voting System Is Certified and Decertified]]