BOE calculating final tallies in Montgomery County executive race after exhaustive recount
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. (7News) — The Montgomery County Board of Elections announced Monday night that election workers are done counting the final numbers in the race for county executive between David Blair and Marc Elrich following an exhaustive process.
During the early voting recount, Blair gained one vote. Then, during the recount of Election Day, the board said David Blair gained four votes and incumbent Marc Elrich also gained four votes.
The board corrected itself late Monday after initially reporting Blair gained five votes during the Election Day recount.
Both Blair and Elrich gained zero votes after a provisional ballot recount.
The auditing of mail-in ballots is currently in progress, the board said Monday.
It's been a long few days for elections workers, who gathered Saturday in the Germantown Community Center gymnasium for the second day of the recount.
This process is due to the fact incumbent Marc Elrich had only a 35-vote lead over challenger David Blair.
Originally, the margin was 42 votes, but Blair requested a recount after the discovery of more than 100 uncounted provisional ballots.
The plan was for election workers to recount early voting ballots on Friday, Election Day votes on Saturday, and provisional and mail-in ballots Sunday.
However, Montgomery County Board of Elections attorney Kevin Karpinski announced during opening remarks Saturday that they would have to recount some of the early votes they already recounted Friday.
"We knew there were some issues with regards to totals for early voting. Staff do not want to go ahead and provide information that was not correct. We will go ahead and recount those early voting sites this morning," Karpinski said to the elections workers Saturday morning. "You need to make sure you look at that entire race. Like I said yesterday, this is a reminder for the purposes of this exercise, we don't care about any other race. We care about only the county executive race. We care very deeply about the county executive race. If there is any abnormality, anything where the voter has not filled in the oval correctly and there's an issue with voter intent, or there's a stray mark that's gone down the ballot, that's a situation where the scanner may have picked it up as an overvote."
The possible mistake on Friday, according to Karpinski, was due to elections workers placing recounted early voting ballots in the wrong pile on their desk. Each table has four separated piles: for Elrich, for Blair, a different candidate, or an overvote.
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However, Karpinski told 7News he did not believe this mistake was repeated Saturday.
That’s why we want people to go slowly, make sure they get it right the first time," Karpinski said. “What we do is we make sure all the ballots from Election Day match all the ballots that are manually being counted by tables. If there’s a discrepancy, then we go back and recount and reconcile where that mistake was made.
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Karpinski did not blame elections workers for the possible mistakes made Friday.
At the end of Saturday's recount, 7News asked the lawyer who or what was to blame, and if this would have an effect on the timeline of finishing the recount, which they were hoping would be done by Sunday night.
“With any situation where you’re going to have people manually count ballots, there can be a situation where there’s a miscalculation,” Karpinski said. “I think everything has been moving very smoothly, the teams seem to be working very efficiently, so we’re hopeful we’ll finish tomorrow.”
The county continued the recount Sunday at 9:30 a.m. and finished for the day at around 7 p.m.
SEE MORE | Elrich claims victory, Blair calls for recount in Montgomery County executive race
The count was done by Monday night.
A spokesperson for the Montgomery County Board of Elections said: “Recount has ended. We plan to release Election day through District 13 & Provisional ballot recount results. We are currently auditing recounted Mail-in ballots. We hope to release Mail-in Tuesday night.”
