What election equipment does Greene County utilize?

Greene County currently uses the Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) voting equipment. The DS200 is the ballot tabulation equipment and the ExpressVote is a ballot marking device, which is a piece of accessible voting equipment required by federal law for all federal elections. Election equipment used for tabulation and marking ballots for tabulation must be approved by the Missouri’s Secretary of State’s Office and meet the Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.

How did Greene County choose the current election equipment?

In 2017, the Greene County Clerk’s Office went out for bid for new election equipment. At the time, the Missouri’s Secretary of State’s Office had approved 3 election equipment vendors local election authorities could choose from for their election equipment (Dominion, Elections Systems & Software, and Unisyn). Since then, the Secretary of State’s Office has approved one additional election equipment vendor (Hart InterCivic).

During the bidding and selection period, Greene County citizens were invited and participated in the overall process. The County Clerk’s Office worked closely with the Greene County Information Systems department to review any potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities of the equipment prior to making a final decision.
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How does Greene County secure the voting systems?

Greene County secures the voting equipment by using many industry safeguarding procedures and tools, including but not limited to using locks, tamper-evident seals, security cameras, chain-of-custody documentation, secure facility and cybersecurity access controls, and system testing before and after each election.

These processes are continuously reviewed and updated to ensure best practices are implemented to improve the security posture against vulnerabilities.
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What does the system testing before and after each election look like?

Prior to each election, a public logic and accuracy test of the accessible voting equipment used to mark ballots and the digital scan voting equipment used to tabulate ballots takes place by bi-partisan testing teams.

The purpose of the public tests is to ascertain that the equipment will correctly count the votes cast on all measures for the election. The tests are conducted with a pre-audited group of hand-counted ballots marked as to record a predetermined number of valid votes on each measure and for each candidate, and includes one or more ballots which have votes in excess of the number allowed by law in order to test the ability of the automatic tabulating equipment to reject such votes. If any error is detected during the logic and accuracy tests, the cause is determined and corrected and an errorless count is made before the automatic tabulating equipment is certified by the bipartisan testing team.

The tests are always open to the press and the public to come and watch. Then prior to certification of the election results the same logic and accuracy test takes place. In addition to the logic and accuracy test, a manual recount of the cast ballots of no less than 5% of the polling locations for the election takes place to verify the tabulation equipment machines correctly tabulated the ballots cast. The selected polling locations are randomly drawn.

From the randomly drawn selected polling locations, the following categories are selected to be hand-counted in the manual recount:

• One (1) contested race or ballot issue to be manually recounted shall be selected where applicable:
  • Presidential and Vice-Presidential electors, United States senate candidates and state-wide candidates;
  • State-wide ballot issues;
  • United States representative candidates and state general assembly candidates;
  • Partisan circuit and associate circuit judge candidates and all nonpartisan judicial retention candidates;
  • No less than one (1) contested race or ballot issue from all political subdivisions and special districts, including the county, in the selected precinct(s); and
  • All races in which the margin of victory between the two (2) top candidates is equal to or less than one-half of one percent (0.5%) of the number of votes cast. (15 CSR 30-10.110)

A working example of the Missouri Code of State Regulations (CSR) in action was the publicly-held manual recount for the 135th State House Representative race in November 2020. The Missouri Code of State regulations calls for a manual recount anytime the percentage margin of difference is equal to or less than one-half of one percent. The difference in the contest for the 135th, before the recount, was .45%. Results of the manual recount are as follows:

STEVE HELMS (REP)….....8472 (47.76%)
BETSY FOGLE (DEM)…....8548 (48.19%)
VICKIE KEPLING (GRN)….….696 (3.90%)
WRITE-IN………..…………………..22 (.12%)

The manual count affirmed that the ballot tabulation equipment had not erred in tabulation of the race.
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