County clerks would check election results against paper ballots

County clerks would manually check random paper ballots in selected statewide contests. Auditors would inspect random samples of paper ballots from randomly selected vote-counting units. The audit would cover the statewide contest with the most votes and, if available, another contested statewide contest chosen at a public meeting no later than seven days after the election. Contests with a margin of 0.25 percent or less are excluded. If an audit leads to a full manual count, that count replaces the machine totals for determining the official result. The bill would require these audits for elections held in 2027 and later. Each audit must finish before the county canvass and certification.

Election workers would count excess ballots and document the mismatch. This applies when ballots outnumber the voters recorded on the poll list, including ballots handled by municipal inspectors and absentee ballot canvassers. Workers would record the number and type of excess ballots, and the mismatch would be included in the risk-limiting audit. The Elections Commission would investigate if the mismatch exceeds 0.5 percent of ballots cast in the audit unit, and would develop procedures to preserve legally cast ballots and maintain election integrity. This process would apply to selected contests subject to risk-limiting audits beginning January 1, 2026, and to all elections beginning April 1, 2027.

The Elections Commission would allow certain error-rate checks to use batch-level comparisons. This concerns the required assessment of voting-system error rates. The comparison must meet commission standards and compare reported totals with manual counts for vote-counting units; any mismatch would help determine whether to check more units.