16-42. Electronic voting requirements
(a) When used at primary or special primary elections, the automatic tabulating equipment of the electronic voting system shall count only votes for the candidates of one party, or nonpartisans. In all elections, the equipment shall reject all votes for an office when the number of votes therefor exceeds the number that the voter is entitled to cast.
No electronic voting system shall be used in
any election unless it generates a paper ballot or voter verifiable paper audit
trail that may be inspected and corrected by the voter before the vote is cast,
and unless every paper ballot or voter verifiable paper audit trail is retained
as the definitive record of the vote cast.
(b) The chief election officer may rely on
electronic tallies created directly by electronic voting systems, in lieu of
counting the paper ballots by hand or with a mechanical tabulation system, if:
(1) The electronic voting system is subject to
inspection, audit, and experimental testing, by qualified observers, before and
after the election, pursuant to administrative rules adopted by the chief
election officer under chapter 91;
(2) No upgrades, patches, fixes, or alterations are
applied to the system through thirty days after the election;
(3) The chief election officer conducts a
post-election, pre-certification audit of a random sample of not less than ten
per cent of the precincts employing the electronic voting system, to verify
that the electronic tallies generated by the system in those precincts equal
hand tallies of the paper ballots generated by the system in those precincts;
provided that accurate copies of the paper ballots, including accurate
electronic copies, may be used in place of the paper ballots when verifying
that the electronic tallies are equal to the hand tallies of the paper ballots;
and
(4) When discrepancies appear in the
pre-certification audits in paragraph (3), the chief election officer, pursuant
to administrative rules, immediately conducts an expanded audit to determine
the extent of misreporting in the system.
[L 1970, c 26, pt of §2; am L 1973, c
217, §6(g); am L 1979, c 139, §12; am L 2005, c 200, §1; am L 2006, c 5, §2; am
L 2024, c 27, §2]
