Considering Montgomery County elections workers only got through 1,400 provisional ballots out of a possible 12,000 Monday, officials are saying there’s no way they’ll have all the votes certified by Monday as they’re supposed to.
Marjorie Roher, speaking on behalf of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, said Tuesday that the pace of the review of the ballots was going “slower than anticipated” because of all the necessary verification steps.
“When a provisional ballot is received, we need to verify that they’re registered to vote in this state, which precinct they’re registered with and that they didn’t vote on a machine on an absentee ballot. It takes time,” she told The Examiner. “We’ll be lucky if we get it done … by the end of the day Friday.”
From there, election officials still have another batch of absentee ballots to review before their final counts can be sent to the state’s headquarters.
Roher noted that Monday is the day Maryland election officials set to certify all the state’s primary election votes. Montgomery County won’t be penalized for sending its tallies past that deadline so long as it sends its numbers within 24 hours of the last counted vote.
“There’s no reason why that wouldn’t occur,” she said.
Originally, the hope was to take two or three days max to review provisional, absentee and overseas ballots, Roher said.
A group of about 20 workers —picked from the election judges who were used during last week’s primaries — have been involved with the canvassing of these non-electronic ballots. On Monday and Tuesday, they worked 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., with a short break each mid-afternoon. But getting through the estimated 10,000 to 12,000 ballots even close to on schedule might mean that they’ll work some long nights or even during the weekend, Roher said.
An estimate of how many provisional ballots Montgomery County verified during Tuesday’s canvassing was not available as of press time.
Phone messages left for several state elections board managers were unreturned by deadline Tuesday.
