Proposed legislation to provide requirements for paper ballots, vote scanning devices, and vote tabulating equipment:
A paper ballot is the means by which a single eligible voter may convey their unambiguous consent and will to the government of their choosing, and from which each, all, and only eligible voters’ indelible vote choices may be accurately tallied to determine the electorate’s aggregate will and thereby the legitimate, free, and fair outcome of election races and ballot issues. To ensure that all and only eligible voters’ ballot choices are counted, accurately, in full transparency to the public, all public officials and especially election officials shall procure, produce, and use only those ballots which, by a combination of design and procedure, incorporate sufficient safeguards to ensure:
• No counterfeit ballots, (meaning ballots not issued by the chief election official of the jurisdiction) may be introduced, substituted for any voters’ cast ballots, nor counted.
• The preservation of the ballots themselves as an indelible and unambiguous, publicly available, auditable record of voters’ choices, that the voters themselves may identify and review to ensure that their own ballot choices have been properly recorded.
• To a reasonable extent, given the faithful effort by public officials, the secrecy of voter choices is preserved so that no one but the individual voter may associate their own ballot choices with their identity.
• Those safeguards must include human-readable discrete ballot numbering such that the voter may verify that their own ballot has been counted as cast, and so the chief election official of a jurisdiction may immediately determine upon viewing a ballot that the ballot number does not belong to their jurisdiction, and whether any ballot with the same number has been previously cast in the same election. While no safeguard is sufficient to remedy or make a ballot trustworthy for which chain-of-custody, between the eligible voter casting the ballot and a sworn election official accepting that ballot, preferably under uninterrupted, publicly available, and reviewable video surveillance, has been lost, other safeguards may reduce risk of fraud. In addition to ballot control numbers, safeguards shall include at least three various anti-fraud measures on the ballot and ballot paper itself, such as watermarks, holographs, taggants, and other anti-counterfeiting techniques developed and used to protect U.S. paper currency. If computer-based ballot scanning and vote tabulation equipment are used, that equipment must be verified and certified by election officials, under penalty of law, to be incapable of reading or executing any embedded code or triggers on scanned ballots.
Proposed Language:
Every official ballot shall include serialized numbers, readable by humans, but not by machines, and shall include at least three of the following features:
(a) Watermarks;
(b) Holographs;
(c) Taggants; or
(d) Other anti-counterfeiting techniques developed and used to protect U.S. paper currency.
Each polling place shall be equipped so that every ballot distributed at the polling place is under video surveillance from the time the ballot is handed to the voter until it is sealed in the appropriate storage box by the receiving board for transmission to the county canvassing board.
All ballots and recorded video surveillance shall be kept for three years.
Any vote scanning device or vote tabulation equipment shall be verified and certified, under penalty of election falsification, by election officials to be incapable of reading or executing any embedded code or triggers on scanned ballots.