SPRINGFIELD, MO.– Greene County Clerk Shane Schoeller says election security is a top priority, which is why his team is double-checking the accuracy of its vote-counting machines.

His office does this after every local election. This time though, they’re doing things differently.

People from around Greene County witnessed and participated in the debut of a new election-auditing process: the risk-limiting audit. It’s a new election accuracy test using 20 multi-sided dice and real ballots from the most recent Greene County election.

Schoeller says this method is much better than the state’s current post-audit process. He says when Greene County post-audits, no less than five percent of the polling locations of the casted ballots that day are evaluated.

His new risk-limiting audit, however, looks at a much wider range of polling locations. He says this ensures the accuracy and election security he’s looking for.

“This is something we know machines error, we know mistakes happen, and that’s why you have to have a process there to account for that,” Schoeller said Thursday.

“That’s what today is about, is that we may have a machine that makes a mistake on the Election Day, we may have potentially been hacked. We’re going to do everything we can to mitigate that and make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Schoeller hopes the state pursues this auditing process in future elections. But, he says he doubts Missouri will consider this as soon as 2020.