Military-overseas ballots; electronic return of voted ballots, pilot program.

Directs the Commissioner of Elections to establish and supervise a pilot program by which an active duty member of a uniformed service who has been deployed overseas and is a registered voter of a county or city participating in such pilot program may return his voted military-overseas ballot by electronic means. The Commissioner is required to promulgate standards and develop procedures for the secure transmission and return, storage, and processing of voted military-overseas ballots, including security measures, methods for verifying and authenticating a voter's identity, and encryption methods for the voted ballots. To the fullest extent practicable, these standards and procedures are required to incorporate the use of blockchain technology, defined in the bill as technology using distributed databases and ledgers protected against revision by publicly verifiable open source cryptographic algorithms and protected from data loss by distributed records sharing. The bill requires counties and cities participating in the pilot program to participate in a security review after each election. In each year of the pilot program, the bill requires the Commissioner to conduct a security assessment and update the security measures for the pilot program. The bill also requires that voters eligible to return their military-overseas ballots by electronic means through the pilot program be permitted to sign the statement of voter and any other documents related to absentee voting using the digital signature associated with their respective Common Access Cards issued by the U.S. Department of Defense. The pilot program is in effect for elections held on and after January 1, 2020. The bill requires the Commissioner to submit a report on or before December 1, 2024, on the outcomes of the pilot program and to include a recommendation as to whether to implement the electronic return of voted military-overseas ballots on a permanent, statewide basis. The bill has an expiration date of December 31, 2024.