After Brian Kemp suppressed enough votes and stirred up enough bigotries to get himself elected governor of Georgia last November, you might have expected him to hit the ground running with some extra-crazy, super-Trumpy initiatives. Kemp edged out Democrat Stacey Abrams, after all, by running as Trump with a Deep-South Drawl—brandishing his shotgun at a teenage boy, threatening to personally round up “criminal illegals” and run them out of the state, painting Abrams as the new Angela Davis. When he took office in January, Georgians braced for something audacious: semi-automatics mandated in every household, a “beautiful wall” to be built around the state, or perhaps a requirement to say “Merry Christmas” during the holidays. That’s the sort of governin’ that Kemp voters were led to expect.

But the governor’s most consequential move thus far has been to urge the state to buy super-pricey new electronic voting machines to replace its 27,000 ancient, notoriously hackable models that Kemp insisted on using last time for his own election. But lest you think Kemp is motivated by a desire for freer and fairer elections, there is, in fact, a Trumpian catch: The likely recipient of Georgia’s largesse will be a company that one of Kemp’s closest aides used to lobby for, while another served on its board of advisers. So far, Kemp’s administration has apparently been fueled by good old-fashioned crony corruption, rather than newfangled populism.

The cost of the replacement machines, known as ballot-marking devices (BMDs), is sky-high: Kemp included $150 million in his budget to buy them. That’s just an initial price, not including annual maintenance fees and licensing deals and such, but it’s at least three times what it would cost to have Georgians vote by paper ballot, as 70 percent of the country now does. Fiscal responsibility, y’all!

The justification for the big-spending election bill—which zipped through the state House and now awaits approval in the Republican-dominated Senate—is that the machines will ward off cybersecurity threats while making elections more efficient than the messy old paper balloting. Inconveniently for the GOP, neither is true. Electronic voting machines, all the rage after Florida’s meltdown in 2000, are largely passé, both because of their costs and their vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. In an exhaustive report last September, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine urged that paper be used for all U.S. elections in 2020, because “no known technology can guarantee the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the internet.”

Cybersecurity and computer-science experts have said for years that the only way to ward off election tampering is to use paper ballots. Fifty-five percent of Georgia voters, who’ve learned not to trust their state’s election results after years of controversies, lawsuits, and scandals, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution they wanted to switch to paper.