Election Machinery

Congress and the several States may require proof or reliable verification of United States citizenship as a condition of registering to vote, or remaining registered to vote, in federal elections.

Verification requirements shall be uniform within each State, publicly disclosed in advance, applied without regard to race, national origin, or party affiliation, and administered with a provisional ballot and prompt cure procedure for any eligible citizen whose citizenship cannot be verified at the time of registration or voting.

Congress and the several States may require auditable statewide voter-registration lists, voter-verifiable paper records, documented chain of custody for ballots and election equipment, uniform ballot-receipt deadlines subject to statutory exceptions for military and overseas voters, prompt public counting, durable audit logs, risk-based post-election audits, public canvass procedures, and civil or criminal penalties for intentional violations of election law by officials, vendors, campaigns, political committees, donors, litigation funders, or other persons acting in connection with a federal election.

No foreign national, foreign government, foreign political party, foreign state-owned or state-directed enterprise, entity controlled by any of the foregoing, or person acting as an undisclosed agent for any of the foregoing may fund, direct, own, control, administer, litigate on behalf of, supply election technology to, or otherwise materially support the administration of a federal election, a ballot-measure campaign, election-related litigation, a voter-registration organization, an election-technology vendor, or a political data-infrastructure or campaign-data platform, except as Congress may by law permit for the ordinary commercial supply of goods or services that present no risk to election administration or control of election-related data.

Voting systems, tabulation systems, electronic poll books, voter-registration databases, election-management systems, and campaign-data platforms used in connection with a federal election shall be subject to requirements of domestic ownership and control, independent security testing, auditability, incident reporting, chain-of-custody documentation, and disclosure of beneficial ownership, as Congress shall by law provide.

A State may adopt election-integrity, cybersecurity, transparency, or foreign-influence safeguards more stringent than those Congress establishes, so long as they are consistent with this article, the remainder of the Constitution, and do not abridge the right to vote.

This Act may be cited as the "Election Machinery Integrity Act."

Congress finds the following:

(1) The Help America Vote Act of 2002 established the Election Assistance Commission, minimum voting-system standards, and provisional voting, but left significant gaps in chain-of-custody documentation, vendor ownership disclosure, and post-election audit design, which this Act is intended to close.

(2) The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 clarified the process for certifying and counting presidential electoral votes at the federal level. That Act addressed a different stage of the process than this Act: it governs how completed state certifications are transmitted to and counted by Congress, not how ballots are tabulated, secured, or audited at the state and local level.

(3) The Department of Homeland Security designated election infrastructure a critical infrastructure subsector in January 2017, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has since provided the principal federal security assistance available to state and local election offices. That assistance has operated as a voluntary partnership; this Act establishes statutory reporting and coordination requirements to make it durable regardless of administration.

(4) Federal law has long required registrants to attest to United States citizenship under penalty of perjury on the national mail voter registration form, and false attestation is a federal crime. Verified instances of noncitizen voting are rare relative to the size of the electorate, and any verification system Congress or a State adopts under this Act must be built, funded, and evaluated with that baseline in view — neither dismissing the problem nor assuming it is widespread.

(5) Voter-verifiable paper records, documented chain of custody, and prompt public counting are the ordinary means by which the outcome of an election is made verifiable to the losing side as well as the winning side, and are the most direct statutory tools available to sustain public confidence in tabulation.

(a) *Verification methods.* A State requiring citizenship verification as a condition of registering to vote, or remaining registered to vote, in a federal election shall accept verification through at least one of the following: documentary proof of citizenship; a match against a secure federal or state database, including Department of Homeland Security systems for naturalized citizens and Social Security Administration data where authorized; passport records; birth records; tribal enrollment records where applicable; military service records; or another method approved by the Election Assistance Commission in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security.

(b) *Provisional ballot and cure.* An individual whose citizenship cannot be verified before or at the time of voting shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot. The State shall provide a cure process of not fewer than 10 business days after the election, during which the individual may submit qualifying documentation, and the provisional ballot shall be counted upon timely cure.

(c) *No cost to voter.* No fee may be charged to an individual for a document required solely to verify citizenship for voter registration. A State imposing a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement shall provide a no-cost pathway to obtain a qualifying document, such as a free birth-certificate copy or waiver program, for an individual who attests inability to pay.

(d) *Existing UOCAVA registrants unaffected.* Nothing in this section shall delay or condition the registration, ballot transmission, or ballot counting of a covered voter under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (52 U.S.C. 20301 et seq.), who shall remain subject to the citizenship attestation already required on the Federal Post Card Application.

(e) *Interagency support.* An agency holding citizenship or naturalization records shall provide secure, privacy-protective verification responses to State election officials upon request, subject to the safeguards of the Privacy Act of 1974 and applicable data-security law. A State shall maintain an audit log of verification queries, matches, non-matches, and cures, retained for not fewer than 22 months, consistent with 52 U.S.C. 20701.

(a) *Statewide voter-registration lists.* Each State shall maintain, as required by section 303 of the Help America Vote Act (52 U.S.C. 21083), an auditable, interactive, computerized statewide voter-registration list, with unique voter identifiers, change logs, source records for each addition or removal, removal and restoration reasons, address-update records, periodic death-record matching, felony-status updates where State law makes felony status a basis for removal, duplicate-registration review, and a public list-maintenance report that excludes personally identifying data not otherwise public.

(b) *Uniform receipt deadline.* Except as provided in subsection (c), a ballot cast in a federal election shall be received by the close of polls on election day to be counted.

(c) *UOCAVA and emergency exceptions.* The deadline in subsection (b) does not apply to:

(1) a ballot cast by a covered voter under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which shall be governed by the transmission and counting deadlines of that Act and the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, including the requirement that States transmit ballots to such voters not later than 45 days before a federal election;

(2) a ballot subject to a State deadline extension ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction to remedy a violation of law; or

(3) a ballot cast by a voter in a jurisdiction subject to a gubernatorial or presidential emergency declaration that disrupted in-person voting or mail delivery, to the extent the State provides by law.

(d) *Chain of custody as a condition of counting.* A ballot may not be counted in a federal election unless it satisfies the applicable deadline under this section and the chain-of-custody requirements of section 105.

(a) *Paper as the record of legal effect.* Every vote cast in a federal election shall be recorded on, or produced as, a voter-verifiable paper record, which shall constitute the official record for purposes of recount, audit, and contest. An electronic tally may assist administration and inform reporting, but the paper record governs whenever the two conflict.

(b) *Chain of custody.* Election officials shall maintain a documented chain of custody covering ballots, paper records, memory and storage media, tabulators, electronic poll books, election-management systems, security seals, transport, storage, adjudication of ambiguous ballots, duplication of damaged ballots, and canvass. Chain-of-custody logs and batch-level results shall be published in machine-readable form promptly after canvass, subject to redaction of information that would identify an individual voter's ballot.

(c) *Prompt counting.* Counting shall begin promptly after the close of polls, or earlier where State law permits processing of ballots without release of results before polls close. A jurisdiction shall publish scheduled reporting updates until counting is substantially complete, identify by category any ballots not yet counted, and retain durable logs of adjudication and tabulation decisions for the retention period required by 52 U.S.C. 20701.

(a) *Baseline standards.* Voting systems, tabulation systems, electronic poll books, voter-registration databases, election-management systems, ballot-on-demand systems, and campaign-data platforms used in a federal election shall meet or exceed the then-current Voluntary Voting System Guidelines adopted by the Election Assistance Commission under section 231 of the Help America Vote Act (52 U.S.C. 20971), and shall in addition be domestically owned and controlled, independently security-tested, software-independent where practicable, tamper-evident, log-generating, and auditable by authorized federal, State, and local officials.

(b) *Vendor disclosure.* A vendor of a system described in subsection (a) shall disclose to the Election Assistance Commission and to each purchasing jurisdiction: beneficial ownership; control of source code; subcontractors with system access; any foreign development, manufacture, or maintenance of system components; remote-access capability; data-storage locations; update and patch procedures; a summary of incident history; a public summary of penetration-test results; and the identity of any foreign national or foreign-controlled entity with privileged access to the system.

(c) *Escrow.* Source code, build documentation, cryptographic hash values, and system images for each certified system shall be escrowed with the Election Assistance Commission or its designee for audit purposes.

(a) *Prohibition.* No foreign national, foreign government, foreign political party, foreign state-owned or state-directed enterprise, entity controlled by any of the foregoing, or undisclosed agent of any of the foregoing may fund the administration of a federal election, a ballot-measure campaign, election-related litigation, a voter-registration organization, an election-technology vendor, or a political data-infrastructure or campaign-data platform.

(b) *Source-of-funds certification.* A domestic recipient covered by this section shall certify the source of funds and the true human source of any contribution exceeding $200, consistent with existing disclosure thresholds under 52 U.S.C. 30104.

(c) *Voidable contracts.* A government contract with a vendor described in section 106 that is controlled by a foreign adversary (as defined in 15 C.F.R. 7.4), a person sanctioned under federal law, or an undisclosed beneficial owner is voidable at the election of the contracting State or federal agency.

(d) *Emergency replacement.* The Election Assistance Commission or a State chief election official may order emergency replacement of a vendor or system found to pose an immediate security risk, subject to prompt public notice of the basis for the order.

(a) *Post-election audit.* Each federal election shall be subject to a risk-based post-election audit sufficient to provide statistical confidence in tabulation accuracy, verify chain of custody, and confirm system integrity, consistent with audit methodologies developed by the Election Assistance Commission in consultation with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

(b) *Incident reporting.* A significant cyber incident, unauthorized system access, lost ballots, an unexplained chain-of-custody gap, tabulator malfunction, database intrusion, or vendor compromise affecting a federal election shall be reported to the State chief election official, the Election Assistance Commission, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within 24 hours of discovery, and to the public within a period set by the Election Assistance Commission according to the severity of the incident.

(c) *Penalties.* Intentional destruction of election records, false certification of results, unauthorized access to an election system, knowing acceptance of foreign funding prohibited by section 107, willful falsification of chain-of-custody records, ballot tampering, tabulation manipulation, or vendor concealment of a fact required to be disclosed under section 106 is subject to civil penalties, disqualification from future election contracts, and referral for criminal prosecution under applicable federal law, including 52 U.S.C. 20511.

(d) *Negligent violations.* A negligent violation of this Act that does not involve the conduct described in subsection (c) shall be addressed through a corrective action plan, retraining, public reporting, and, where the Election Assistance Commission finds a pattern of noncompliance, conditions on federal election-administration funding.

(a) *Citizenship verification.* Section 103 takes effect for federal elections held more than 18 months after the date of enactment, to allow States time to establish database-matching agreements, cure procedures, and no-cost documentation pathways before the requirement governs any federal election.

(b) *Paper record, custody, disclosure, and reporting provisions.* Sections 104, 105, 106(b), and 108(b) take effect not later than 12 months after enactment.

(c) *System replacement.* A system that must be replaced to comply with section 106(a) shall be replaced not later than the beginning of the first federal election cycle that begins 24 months after enactment, unless the Election Assistance Commission grants a public, risk-based extension not to exceed one additional election cycle.

(d) *UOCAVA continuity.* No provision of this Act shall be construed to shorten the 45-day ballot-transmission deadline or other protections currently provided to covered voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act and the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act.