ST. CHARLES COUNTY, Mo. – St. Charles County voters shattered an election record on Tuesday. Election officials conducted a hand count audit on Thursday to assure voters the results were accurate.

St. Charles County Director of Elections Kurt said the audit, performed on a sampling of votes, perfectly matched the machine count.

“Each team of judges found the Election Day totals matched their count,” he said. “It took nine teams six hours to complete this hand count audit.”

State law requires the routine procedure. A Republican and Democratic volunteer helped randomly pick which nine of the more than 100 precincts would be audited.

The counting took place in an open area of the election authority, with members of the public watching as the bipartisan teams went through boxes of ballots to tally the results for the races and ballot issues.

“One of the things we do is not give them the vote totals from election night until after they have finished the hand count, so there’s no way they could try to make the numbers match,” Bahr said.

A record number of people—228,700—cast their ballots in St. Charles County during the absentee voting period through Election Day.

That breaks the earlier record of 223,533, set in November 2020. Voter turnout in St. Charles County was 76%, slightly lower than 2020 due to increased voter registrations.

There are currently 301,218 registered voters in St. Charles County. Of those, 76,338 voted before Nov. 5, while 152,362 voted on Election Day.