Wyn Delano
WMAL.com
The first round of absentee ballots in Montgomery County will be posted Friday evening, injecting 6,342 new votes into the dead-heat race for County Executive.
After the polls closed on primary day on Tuesday Marc Ellrich held a 452 vote lead over his democratic challenger David Blair. The race was too close to call and a release from the first day of counting absentee ballots Thursday shaved Ellrich’s lead to 269 votes.
“This is probably, in my sixteen years here with the [Mongomery County] Board of Elections, the closest we’ve ever had,” says Marjorie Roher, spokeswoman. The ballots are required to be counted based on the order they were received, with the remainder of absentee ballots received before July 6th to be counted then.
In a race this tight, provisional ballots given out to voters who had issues voting normally have an even greater importance – especially after an MVA voting glitch forced approximately 80,000 voters to use the irregular ballots. The MVA has since claimed fewer people were affected by the error, but did not give specific numbers.
“We’re probably going to be at least going to the provisional canvass and seeing where that leads us,” Roher told WMAL. She said that the counting of those ballots begins on July 5th and its unlikely that we will see a concrete result before those votes are tabulated.
While the race between Blair and Ellrich is technically just a primary, the stakes are that of a general election in the heavily Democratic Montgomery County. The winner between the two will face Robin Ficker, Republican nominee in the fall.
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