District 4 incumbent Shebra Evans’ lead has increased over challenger Bethany Mandel in the Montgomery County Board of Education primary as mail-in ballots continued to be canvassed, according to the latest unofficial state elections board results.
As of Monday afternoon, Evans had 27.78% of the vote and Mandel had 24.41%. Evans is appearing likely to join newcomer Laura Stewart, who has a strong lead with 47.8% percent of the vote, on the ballot in November in the race to represent District 4 on the school board.
On May 14, voters cast ballots for school board seats in the At-Large and districts 2 and 4 races. The top two-vote getters in each race move on to the Nov. 5 general election.
The day after the election, Evans led Mandel by just over a point and a difference of less than 1,000 votes. In the at-large race, incumbent Lynne Harris continues to lead with challenger Rita Montoya in second. In the District 2 race, challengers Natalie Zimmerman and Brenda Diaz appear poised to make it to the November ballot.
Montgomery County Board of Elections President David Naimon said Monday canvassers have been efficiently processing the mail-in ballots and there haven’t been any delays, with the board even canceling some scheduled canvassing sessions.
“We’ve been moving at a good pace,” Naimon said.
The board has received a total of 78,383 mailed ballots and processed 50,142 as of Saturday night. According to state board of elections data, 134,779 county residents requested a mail-in ballot.
Voters were able to place their mail-in ballots in polling place dropboxes until polls closed at 8 p.m. on primary day. 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 May 14. Only around 20,000 voters participated in in-person early voting from May 2 through 9. When compared to the 2022 primary, early voting and Election Day voting is down and mail-in ballots are slightly up, Naimon said.
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 the county on May 14 is unofficially 6,500, according to Naimon.
On Sunday, the county elections board responded to a complaint posted on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, alleging that a voter had received a partially filled ballot.
“[We] received a complaint that at an Election Day polling place, a voter was inadvertently handed a ballot that had been partially completed by another voter that should have been voided,” the board tweeted. “The voter alerted Election Judges, who explained that they should have voided the ballot and not given it to the voter, voided that ballot, and provided a new ballot to the voter. Our election judges apologized for the error, and the voter voted a new ballot.”
The initial post, which was made by local blog CleanSlateMoCo, showed an image with a partially filled-in ballot.
Naimon explained that a previous voter had likely asked for a new ballot because they made an error, but the “spoiled” ballot was not properly discarded.
“Human error does happen. The error in this instance was that a ballot that had been voided was not voided immediately and ended up being handed to a voter. That is a big mistake and one that is going to be addressed in our training in detail for the general election,” Naimon said. “It already is part of training that spoiled ballots need to be marked as spoiled.”
