The Baltimore City Board of Elections mistakenly counted an extra 590 votes on Election Day, an error that led to misleading results in the contest for the Baltimore City Council’s 11th District among others.
The overreporting was discovered Thursday during a routine double check of results, the Maryland State Board of Elections announced late Friday. When local officials found the discrepancy, a joint investigation was launched by the city and state election boards. Two verification audits were performed, and the overreporting was confirmed, the state board said.
Human error was responsible for the discrepancy, the state board said. The board’s news release did not elaborate on how.
“The State Board and Baltimore City Board of Elections are confident that all votes canvassed up to this point have been aggregated and tabulated accurately,” the board said in its news release.
Baltimore Election Director Armstead Jones said Thursday that one memory stick used to download vote totals from Election Day ballot scanners was found Wednesday. It had not been uploaded on election night, he said. The omission would not explain an overreporting of results.
Jones acknowledged Friday that the issue was under investigation, but would not acknowledge that a mistake had been made.
“They’re working on it to determine what’s going on,” he said of the state board.
Updated vote totals accounting for the discrepancy were posted without warning Thursday night by the Baltimore City Board of Elections, shifting the outlook of at least one race and raising questions about how the figures changed.
Most impacted was the contest between Councilman Eric Costello and challenger Zac Blanchard for South Baltimore’s District 11. When city elections staff finished counting more than 14,000 mail-in ballots Thursday evening, Costello was leading by just 17 votes. That narrowed the 25-vote margin that separated the two on election night. With the newly tabulated Election Day votes however, Costello now has an 87-vote lead.
The error also touched other races. Mayor Brandon Scott received 245 fewer Election Day votes than were initially reported in his bid to win reelection. Challenger Sheila Dixon received 205 fewer votes. The errors had little impact on the mayoral race which was called on election night in Scott’s favor. Rather than an 8,938-vote margin, Scott is now up by 8,898 votes. Dixon conceded Friday.
In the tight race for the Baltimore City Council’s District 8, the vote discrepancy made a minor adjustment to vote totals. Frontrunner Paris Gray was leading by 156 votes. With the adjusted totals, Gray now has a 142-vote lead.
At least 3,000 more mail-in ballots remain to be counted as well as around 6,300 provisional ballots. The total number of mail-in ballots is subject to change because any ballots postmarked by Tuesday at 8 p.m. are considered timely. The Baltimore City Board of Elections took a break from counting Friday and will resume Monday.
The turn of events was disappointing for Blanchard, who appeared to be exceeding expectations in his bid to unseat Costello. A former Marine who serves as a vice president for the Midtown Community Benefits District, Blanchard financed his campaign against the deep-pocketed Costello with public matching funds. He was the only candidate to max out the program, offered for the first time in 2024. He received $125,000, much of which he used on advertising and mailers criticizing Costello.
Costello could not be reached for comment. He sent a representative to watch vote counting on Thursday.
Blanchard said Friday that the situation was frustrating, although he accepted that the new vote total appeared to be correct.
“At 6 p.m. on Thursday, I would have bet we were going to win this election,” he said. “Now it’s much more up in the air.”
Blanchard said his campaign plans to hire an attorney. He has already consulted the Baltimore City Fair Election Fund, and legal counsel is an acceptable use of funds. He questioned whether his public funding would be enough in the event that he needed to request a recount however. Most of his funds were depleted by the campaign, he said, and more fundraising would be needed to finance a recount.
For now, Blanchard said he would be watching closely as the final mail-in ballots and provisional ballots are counted. He’s hopeful that later mail-in ballots could break in his direction, although he doesn’t know how many remain or how many were cast by District 11 voters.
Moving forward, Blanchard said he would like to see the City Council take a more active role in governing the city’s mail-in ballot processing. The state has made adjustments, like allowing election boards to begin counting ballots early. But some local boards haven’t taken full advantage. Baltimore halted the counting of its ballots so it could staff early voting which began on May 2.
“I definitely think there needs to be thorough oversight by the council about why these things keep happening,” Blanchard said. “And it certainly is not fun to be the candidate it’s happening to.”
