Three Baltimore City Council races are still too close to call as of midday Monday and that isn’t likely to change until later this week.
After a break on Friday and through the weekend, election judges went back to the Board of Elections warehouse in West Baltimore to resume counting ballots cast for the Maryland primary election which was held on May 14th.
Armstead Jones, the director of elections in Baltimore City, said that election judges will count about 1,000 ballots on Monday. Those are primarily ballots from people who voted online and then printed the ballot out at-home. Bipartisan election judges tediously recreate those results by hand on an official ballot to get scanned through the machines and counted. These are called "duplicate ballots."
State data shows around 9,000 mail-in ballots need to be counted although that number is flexible because any ballot postmarked by May 14th could count and they’re still trickling in to be counted.
Most of the remaining mail-in ballots won’t be counted until Wednesday or later, after the 6,344 provisional ballots are tabulated.
That likely means Democratic races in Districts 8, 11, and 12 won’t be resolved until late in the week.
- In District 8, city council staffer Paris Gray leads former state delegate Bilal Ali by 142 votes on Monday.
- In District 11, incumbent Councilman Eric Costello leads newcomer Zac Blanchard by 87 votes.
- In District 12, labor leader Jermaine Jones leads incumbent Robert Stokes by 211 votes.
Meanwhile, questions still linger about the over-reporting of 590 votes that was discovered late last week during an audit that determined that impacted some races, particularly in District 11. That readjustment led to Costello’s lead on Blanchard growing slightly. A news release from the State Board of Elections (SBE) on Friday said that “the source of the overreport was identified as human error and resolved.”
Armstead Jones said he is still looking for additional information. Jones told the Baltimore Sun late last week that a memory stick was found on Wednesday with vote totals that were not counted on Election Day, although that doesn’t explain an overreporting.
“The explanation that I’ve received in writing right now is not clear, not acceptable,” said Jones on Monday.
“An explanation, a letter, came from the state indicating pretty much the process, procedural things and that they would be verifying some technical issues with the vendor.”
Jones declined to identify the “vendor.” Jared DeMarinis, the state Administrator of Elections, declined to go deeply into the matter when reached by phone on Monday night. Instead, he said that the board will have more details about the overcount forthcoming soon, but he did say that the numbers reflected on the SBE website are accurate.
"Everyone should have full faith and confidence in those tallies. Those are the are the correct numbers," said DeMarinis.
According to the State Elections Board calendar, the results have to be certified by Friday.
