A high-pitched whine greets the ear at the Board of Elections warehouse on Franklintown Road in West Baltimore. It’s the sound of two highspeed voting machines.
Baltimore City Council races in Districts 8,11, and 12 remained too close to call after a full-day of counting mail-in ballots on Thursday.
Over two-dozen election judges got to work just after 10 in the morning to count nearly 18,000 mail-in ballots in Baltimore City. They sat two-by-two at lunchroom style tables and opened ballots by hand before sending them to be processed by one of the machines.
By 6 p.m., judges had worked their way through 14,853 of the ballots, confirmed Baltimore City Election Director Armstead Jones. There are also about 6,300 provisional ballots that will be counted next Wednesday.
Many of the candidates and staff anxiously watched on throughout most of the day.
“I’m anxious, excited, all at the same time. But I’m confident that by the end of today we’ll have an answer and we’ll like the results,” said Jermaine Jones during a Thursday afternoon interview. Jones is a labor leader who is running in District 12 against incumbent Councilmember Robert Stokes. Jones had a lead of 150 votes after primary Election Day on Tuesday.
Stokes was unfazed on Thursday as he observed the counting process.
“Mail-in ballots are mostly [from] seniors who I really support programming with them,” he said.
Two candidates entered Thursday with a tight-race for District 8 that will be vacated by Councilmember Kristerfer Burnett who has decided not to run for another term.
“We’re really optimistic. We’ve done the work, we’ve done the ground game and we got out the vote to make sure folks that hadn’t returned their ballots as of early voting and then through Election Day” said Paris Gray, a staffer for Burnett who also enjoys the endorsement of Mayor Brandon Scott in his race. Gray sheepishly admitted that while he was at the elections count on Thursday he was missing a check-up with his wife who is due with their child in July.
“She understands,” said Gray, noting that it is the first appointment he has missed. “She knows I wanted to be here to make sure that democracy is working.”
Gray went into Thursday with a lead of 40.3% of the vote. He faces competition from former state delegate Bilal Ali.
After Thursday’s vote count, Gray lead Ali by 156 votes.
“Tuesday was a real wet and rainy, cold day. So a lot of people just sent in their ballots via mail. I was leading in the mail count,” said Ali, noting that fact made him feel optimistic about potentially ending up victorious in the District 8 election.
Incumbent Councilmember Eric Costello of District 11 was not at the elections warehouse on Thursday. He put out a statement on social media saying, “There are still too many votes to count to declare victory in this race but I remain confident and grateful.”
By the end of Thursday, Costello held just a 17 vote lead over newcomer Zac Blanchard in that race.
On social media Blanchard wrote, “I don’t think we’ll be able to call the race either way until after provisional ballots are counted on Wednesday (the 22nd).”
Meanwhile, the lead Mayor Brandon Scott has on former mayor Sheila Dixon continued to grow as ballots were counted on Thursday. The Associated Press called the victory for Scott on Tuesday night but Dixon has so far not conceded. Her campaign put out a statement on Wednesday saying that they would wait until “all mail-in ballots have been counted.”
Scott is now leading on Dixon by 8,938 votes, up from his 6,500-vote election night margin.
