TRENTON – The Senate passed legislation sponsored by Senator Andrew Zwicker, which would amend the law concerning post-election audits.

“With the widespread adoption of early voting and vote-by-mail, we need a more flexible system capable of accurately and efficiently counting paper and electronic ballots,” said Senator Zwicker (D-Middlesex/Mercer/Somerset/ Hunterdon). “While necessary in the past, hand-counting ballots is simply not the most effective way to audit our elections in the modern era. This legislation is an easy way to make the auditing process more secure and transparent.”

Under the bill, S-3853, these changes would include permitting post-election audits to be conducted by independent third-party electronic machines that are not in any way associated with the official ballot tabulation system for the election, in addition to a hand-to-eye count. Under current law, post-election audits are conducted exclusively through hand-to-eye counts of voter-verifiable paper records.

The bill would establish a standard process for auditing via independent third-party electronic voting machines, and require that the machines be certified by an accredited laboratory or commission. The bill would require county boards of election to randomly select and announce at least two percent of the audit units within 24 hours of its commencement.

Additionally, this legislation would also eliminate certain requirements for audit procedures designed, adopted, and implemented by the audit team to ensure a certain percentage of statistical power that a 100 percent manual recount of the voter-verifiable paper records would not alter the electoral outcome reported by the audit. Instead, post-election audit procedures will be published before elections and subject to public comment.

The bill was passed in a 37-0 vote.