Storage Of The Results Until Election Day

(1) After each machine used in early voting has been processed in the same manner, all the envelopes containing printer tapes and memory cartridges shall be locked and sealed in ballot boxes and stored in a secure location until election day. To prevent the loss of both formats of the results, the printer tapers shall be stored in one ballot box and the memory cartridges stored in a separate box. After the results have been certified, these materials may be stored in the same manner as the other records of the election. The ballot boxes shall be locked with one lock provided by a county election commissioner of the majority party and another lock provided by a commissioner of the minority party. The commissioners shall retain the keys personally. The boxes may not be unlocked except when the votes are to be counted. In addition to the locks, the county election commission shall place two (2) numbered seals on each ballot box with one (1) seal each placed by a county election commissioner of each party. Such seal numbers shall be recorded by the registrar and certified in duplicate by a commissioner of each party, and the original shall be forwarded by mail immediately to the office of the Coordinator of Elections and the duplicate shall be filed in the county election commission office. The seals may not be broken except when the votes are to be counted. If a seal or seals are broken, the registrar shall immediately attach new numbered seals and certify in writing to the Coordinator of Elections the numbers and a description of the circumstances necessitating this action. (2) On election day, the absentee counting board shall follow the procedures in T.C.A. § 2—6—304, as amended, for opening the ballot box containing the memory cartridges. Unless a county is unable to retrieve the results from a memory cartridge, the envelopes containing the printouts should not be opened until after the close of polls on election day. The memory cartridges shall be delivered to the staff member of the county election commission who is responsible for downloading the data from the cartridges into the computer. If the election commission discovers that it cannot read the data on a memory cartridge, then the envelope containing the printer tape from the same machine may be opened and processed by the absentee counting board. As required in T.C.A. §2—6—304(c), the votes for any candidate may not be totaled until after all polls in the county are closed.