While many candidates in the U.S. Senate and congressional races declared victory or conceded defeat a few hours after polls closed Tuesday, the 2024 primary election isn’t over.
The Montgomery County Board of Elections still has to count thousands of mail-in ballots that were not received before Election Day, and it will be 10 days before the election is certified.
“The board doesn’t call races until we’ve counted all of the eligible votes,” President David Naimon said Wednesday during a virtual press briefing hosted by the Montgomery County Executive Office. “News organizations and candidates can, and some have called races, but as far as we’re concerned, we only say that there’s a winner when we’re completely done.”
The tabulating, set to begin Thursday, could particularly impact the Montgomery County Board of Education race, where some margins are close, according to unofficial state board of elections results posted as of 3:30 p.m. Wednesday. For example, in the District 4 race, Laura Stewart has a strong lead with 47.3% of the vote, but her two fellow candidates for the seat are separated by just over a point–incumbent Shebra Evans has 26.94% of votes, with challenger Bethany Mandel close behind at 25.76%. That’s a difference of less than 1,000 votes. The top two of the three candidates will move on to the November general election.
According to state board of elections data, 134,779 county residents requested a mail-in ballot. The Montgomery County Board of Elections has received almost 63,000 mail-in ballots, according to Naimon. As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, 30,845 of those had been processed by the elections board.
Voters were able to place their mail-in ballots in polling place dropboxes until polls closed at 8 p.m. and any ballot postmarked by May 14 will be counted if it is received by the elections board for up to 10 days after the election. The election cannot be certified by the board until every eligible ballot is processed.
Naimon noted that about 110,000 county residents are on an automatic mail-in ballot request list, which means they signed up to automatically receive a mail-in ballot every election. This means that some residents may have received a ballot because they chose to be on the list, but may not have planned to vote in the primary or decided to vote in person. Montgomery County is home to at least 680,831 eligible registered voters.
According to Naimon, 64,000 county residents voted in person on Tuesday. Only around 20,000 voters participated in in-person early voting from May 2 through 9.
The board will begin canvassing remaining uncounted mail-in ballots Thursday and continue canvassing Friday and Saturday. Naimon said the board will assess how many additional canvasses may be needed based on progress over the weekend.
“We encourage anyone who is interested in viewing the election process to come to the canvas, watch it, ask questions of the staff,” elections board Secretary Amie Hoeber said. “We believe that this is a completely fair process with a lot of integrity, and we encourage everyone to come verify that for themselves.”
Provisional ballots will also be processed through canvasses. Voters could be directed to cast their ballot provisionally for a number of reasons, including that their voter registration cannot be verified, they went to the wrong precinct to vote or it cannot be verified that they haven’t already voted. The number of provisional ballots cast in Montgomery County on Tuesday is not yet available.
