Click the icon in the upper-right corner to download the image of Bahr’s hand count estimate
At a County Council meeting in St. Charles County, Missouri, on December 4, 2023, the Director of Elections, Kurt Bahr, submitted a hand count cost estimate to the council members. Bahr’s submission was that the three elections upcoming in 2024, a municipal, primary, and presidential general election would cost the county $1,303,826.25 to hand count the ballots.
What is included in the $1.3 million dollar estimate?
Bahr’s estimate included columns for:
- “Time per team to hand count in hours”
- “Time to count in manhours”
- “Time to count in mandays by team”
- “Teams needed to complete in 5 days”
This is a classic example of when I speak about ‘objections’ that are not grounded in or based on facts. Nothing in the document provided explanations for the county council or the citizens of the meaning of mandays or manhours, or how these estimates were calculated.
The Election Director estimated 62 teams need — for 5 days — to count a municipal election! Take a look at the Turnout Chart for Municipal Elections in St Charles. Voter turnout data from 2021-2024 shows that municipal elections in St. Charles could be counted in 8 hours or less, on election day, with 1 counting team at most voting locations.
The Genesis of the Hand Count Estimator Tool
In a way, Kurt Bahr provided the impetus for the creation of the hand count estimator tool. After receiving this estimate at the council meeting, Councilman Joe Brazil asked me to review and provide feedback. I tried to recreate Bahr’s spreadsheet to get an idea of how he produced these estimates. But I could not create any variation of Excel formulas that gave the same results.
So — I began a fresh spreadsheet that utilized voter turnout and some other variable data to produce estimates of labor and costs for hand counting. The Hand Count Estimator was born. I presented the results from this early version of the Estimator to the County Council. My estimate for the hand count labor costs for three elections in 2024 was $581,500 — $722,000 less than Bahr’s estimate.
15 Months Later, Does Bahr Stand by his $1.3 Million estimate?
Apparently not. Read Let’s Save St Charles County $68,000 on Elections Every Year and how Bahr discovered the Hand Count Estimator at one of our hand count demos. He is using the tool’s results and his estimate in April 2025 is now $280,005 for the 2024 presidential election. Bahr does not celebrate the fact that his estimate dropped by $1 million dollars. While his hand count estimates are unsurprisingly inflated, his claims of voting machines costs are shockingly deflated.
