Updated at 6 p.m.- Jim Shalleck, the president of the Montgomery County Board of Elections (BOE), said Monday he will convene a special meeting of the group to restore an early voting site in Burtonsville.
Shalleck, appointed to the position earlier this year by Gov. Larry Hogan, and two other Republican members of the Republican-majority BOE enraged Democrats last month when they decided to replace early voting sites in Burtonsville and Chevy Chase with sites in less densely populated Brookeville and Potomac.
On Monday afternoon, the BOE announced the special meeting will include a "reconsideration of early voting site selection" and will happen at 5 p.m. Wednesday at its offices in Gaithersburg.
Shalleck said the he was trying to achieve greater geographic diversity among the county’s nine early voting sites for the 2016 primary and general elections. But Democrats almost immediately accused Shalleck and the BOE of partisan politics and voter suppression.
With the public pressure continuing and a State Board of Elections review of the early voting sites set for Thursday in Annapolis, Shalleck said he pitched the special meeting with the hopes of coming up with a compromise.
Shalleck’s proposal would keep an early voting site at the Potomac Community Recreation Center, replacing the Jane Lawton Community Recreation Center in Chevy Chase.
“I’m very sensitive to the outcry from the community and we want to make this fair and above politics,” Shalleck told Bethesda Beat.
The Washington Post first reported Shalleck’s plan to restore the Burtonsville early voting site at the Marilyn Praisner Community Recreation Center. Many Democrats pointed to the nearby Route 29 corridor’s high population of black residents and popularity during early voting in 2014.
Some have claimed the BOE intentionally chose to replace the Burtonsville site to make it harder for those people to vote. In Bethesda and Chevy Chase, local elected officials and Democratic activists have argued that getting rid of the Lawton Center site will make it more difficult for seniors to vote and more difficult for people who work in downtown Bethesda to vote.
The Lawton Center is about a 15-minute walk from the Bethesda Metro station.
Regardless of whether the Burtonsville site is restored, the BOE decision means there will be just one early voting site in Montgomery County inside the Capital Beltway. That site is at the Silver Spring Civic Building.
“The outcry from the citizens persuaded me to compromise. We’re not trying to penalize anybody or take away anybody’s perceived right to vote, but the community in Burtonsville felt very strongly,” Shalleck said Monday. “I think it’s appropriate because we’re trying to act in a bipartisan way.”
Shalleck said he won’t propose restoring the Chevy Chase site because “I still believe in our philosophy of geographic diversity,” and that opening an early voting site in Potomac has been under discussion among those on the board for at least two years.
The State Board of Elections is set to review and possibly approve early voting sites at its meeting Thursday.
Approval by the state board requires a supermajority, meaning at least four votes of the five-member and Republican-majority group.
It’s unclear what the next step would be if the state board doesn’t approve the early voting sites. Darrell Anderson, chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee (MCDCC), told a crowd of local Democratic activists Saturday in Chevy Chase that the group would bring the matter to court if the state board doesn’t restore both the Burtonsville and Chevy Chase sites.
