Section 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.Amended by L 2024, c 27,§ 2, eff. 5/23/2024.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 .