It’s Gregory Holman, your public affairs reporter at KSMU Ozarks Public Radio.
Meet Peggy and Darrel. She’s a Democrat, he’s a Republican.
They’re paid election judges for Greene County, Missouri. Also known commonly as poll workers. Because election officials at all levels sometimes face harsh criticism in these tense political times, and because these election judges are private citizens who aren’t running for office, I’m only using their first names for this report.
Today, Darrel and Peggy will check every aspect of hundreds of test ballots — by hand. Grouped into test decks, the ballots represent all types of voting patterns that eligible Greene County citizens could choose in this year’s general election —will select the next governor of Missouri and president of the United States. The test deliberately includes errors like overvotes or undervotes.
Once the test decks are verified by Peggy and Darrel, their colleagues Mario and Betsy — a married couple in which Mario is a Democrat and Betsy is a Republican — will feed those test ballots into a pair of electronic vote-tabulator machines. Made by manufacturer ES & S, the machines are known as the DS200.
On Friday, September 20, I got to spend the morning with Peggy, Darrel, Mario and Betsy. We met in a small corner of the office of the Greene County Clerk. Ultimately, he’s their supervisor. About a week-and-a-half before I met the election judges, I conducted an interview with Schoeller about election security.
Schoeller says, "We all remember taking the standardized test when we were in elementary school and junior high, high school. That's the exact same technology being used on the ballots that we're voting on."
Again, DS200 uses paper ballots. Schoeller told me the state of Missouri had three certified election equipment vendors several years ago. At that time, he commissioned a broad-based group of local residents to help him choose a vendor.
"The equipment that we ended up choosing was election systems and software called ES & S," Schoeller says. "And I always tell people, you know, we're really pleased with what we had, especially the people in the disability community, really appreciate the accessible equipment that we purchased."
The DS200 comes highly rated by the Verified Voting Foundation, a 20-year-old nonpartisan group that leans liberal. Like the conservative Heritage Foundation I mentioned in my reporting that aired yesterday, Verified Voting publishes a database on election security.
Theirs centers on the voting machines used all around the country. In general, Verified Voting supports the use of accuracy-checked equipment for paper ballots like the ones Greene County uses, as opposed to machines that solely rely on electronic records.
Schoeller has some advice for people worried about the accuracy and integrity of the votes that chart a path for our democracy: “If you're concerned, volunteer to help your county clerk. Because one of the challenges I see is a lot of people have concerns, but they don't roll up their sleeves and come and offer to help, and so that's one of the things I really try to do, and we were successful in counting (on), again, some people who had never worked in elections to sign up and volunteer to do that.”
On Friday, Schoeller’s crew of election judges were running test ballots for two DS200 machines that went into service yesterday — Tuesday, September 24. They’re available for absentee voters visiting the Clerk’s Office in the Greene County Historic Courthouse, or the Elections Center nearby on Boonville Avenue.
When I talked to Schoeller, I asked him to detail misinformation about the voting process that’s been floating around the community in recent times.
“Well, one of the ones that's popped up here in the last handful of years is that if you see an Election Judge or poll workers — some people like to refer to people they meet on the day of the election, work in the elections at the local polling location — is if you see them mark your ballot that you should demand to get a new ballot because a ballot that's marked is not going to be counted. And so that's a common myth that was out in 2020. It's now recirculated here in 2024. And what I like to tell people is, actually in the chain of custody process, we have our election judges, the bipartisan team, will initial that ballot before they hand to the voter. And that way, if, for some reason, we find there's more voter ballots than people checked in, we're going to look for those initials on that ballot to make sure that that was issued by the election judges in that polling location. So that's a common misconception that, for some reason, has gotten legs again. And we want to make sure that everyone's listening knows you want your election judge to mark your ballot, because that's how you know if there's ever a question that's going to be counted."
Schoeller’s staff told me that in a few weeks, they’ll be testing many more machines ahead of the general election on November 5.
Learn more about voting in elections in Greene County by visiting the County Clerk website. Voter information for all Missouri locations is available from the Missouri Secretary of State website.
