A ballot scanner broke for five hours during the first mail-in ballot canvassing Thursday at the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections in Glen Burnie, causing officials to delay announcing returns until Friday, they said.
Due to the delay, the board plans to post the tallies from Thursday’s canvass Friday morning, said Richard Siejack, deputy director of the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections. The delay also prevented officials from completing the count of the roughly 13,300 ballots that were unsealed by around 100 volunteers split into bipartisan teams of two on Thursday. Around 2,000 are left to be scanned.
Around 15,000 ballots will be counted every day on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of next week.
As of Thursday evening, the board had received more than 52,000 mail-in ballots, according to state elections board totals, with more expected to come in. Mailed ballots still will be accepted so long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
Workers sorted ballots collected from dropboxes and received by mail into batches of 50. Volunteers checked that each ballot was from a registered Anne Arundel voter. They then flattened the ballots that were inside envelopes and stacked them to await tabulation. Each ballot was fed into one of two electronic scanners, which tabulates total votes and adds the numbers to the Election Day results. When one of the scanners broke down for a five-hour period, scanning slowed significantly, causing delays.
Of the mail-in ballots received so far, more than 31,000 were cast by Democrats, about 11,000 were cast by Republicans and about 9,300 were from third parties or unaffiliated voters.
A canvass of nearly 7,500 provisional ballots is scheduled for next Wednesday.
See full results here
As canvassing began, most county races remain undecided.
In the closely watched Anne Arundel County executive race, Republican County Councilmember Jessica Haire led incumbent Democrat Steuart Pittman by nearly 11,000 votes after Election Day. Despite his current deficit, Pittman told his cabinet in an email Wednesday that he expects to prevail when mail-in ballots are counted over the coming days.
Julie Hummer, a former Anne Arundel County Board of Education member, declared victory Wednesday in her race for the District 4 County Council seat. Hummer was leading Republican opponent Cheryl Renshaw with 68% of early votes and Election Day ballots cast, according to election returns.
Several candidates came to watch the process at work on Thursday, some confident they would win and others who had all but acknowledged their loss.
Among them was Everett Sesker, the Democratic county sheriff’s candidate, who trailed incumbent Republican Jim Fredericks after Election Day with 44% of the vote to Fredericks’ 56%. Sesker said he understands his race will probably be a close one in the end but believes he’ll prevail.
“A lot of Democrats love to do the early voting and the mail-in,” Sesker said. “I also think I got some of the Republican vote too. I really reached out to the Republican Party … I’m going to be the sheriff for everyone in the county, to me, it doesn’t matter what your party affiliation is, your race or anything like that. It just matters to me that I’m going to do a good job.”
Another candidate, Yuripzy Morgan, a Republican who challenged incumbent Democrat John Sarbanes is trailing by about 37,000 votes in the Third Congressional District that spans parts of Anne Arundel, Howard and Carroll counties. She’s performing better among Anne Arundel County voters, however, leading by about 3,000 votes.
“Although this was not the result we had hoped for, this is still my community and my home. This is where my children are growing up,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “I congratulate John Sarbanes on having the privilege to represent this amazing community in Congress, and I encourage him to get to know us not just as voters, but as friends.”
Morgan visited the Glen Burnie office of the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections to watch ballots get counted Thursday. She suggested those who may have doubts about election integrity do the same to see how the process works.
“I’d like to see how close we get,” she said. “I know people are concerned about the process, I have no doubts. It’s the most transparent system, come see it for yourself. Sometimes I feel people need to hear a Republican say it.”
Del. Heather Bagnall, a Democrat, is locked in a tight race for her District 33C General Assembly seat that covers the Broadneck Peninsula. Republican candidate Kerry Gillespie has received 54% of the vote and Bagnall has 46%.
“I don’t think we could have run a better campaign so now I just have to trust my voters,” Bagnall said, adding she very much looks forward having a new boss in office — Governor-Elect Wes Moore. “I am over the moon. I think Wes Moore is going to bring an energy and enthusiasm to that office and I love that his slogan is, ‘no one left behind.'”
Despite multiple court rulings that allowed county election boards to begin counting mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day, Anne Arundel County’s Republican-led board voted to wait. In an announcement last month the board said “it has the appropriate resources available to canvass all mail-in and provisional ballots within the 10-day window between Election Day and the Nov. 18 certification date and therefore early canvassing of mail-in ballots will not be required.”
All updated election returns for Anne Arundel and state races can be found at: capitalgazette.com/results.
