MoCo Government

David Blair Regains Lead Over Marc Elrich in Latest Democratic Primary Update By State Board of Elections

As mail-In/provisional ballots are counted in the Democratic primary for Montgomery County Executive, David Blair has taken the lead over incumbent Marc Elrich by just 134 votes after trailing by 141 votes on Sunday morning, according to the latest update by the Maryland State Board of Elections at 9:16pm on Monday night. David Blair (42,705, 39.33%) holds a lead of 134 votes over Marc Elrich (42,571, 39.20%). David Blair led by 1,191 votes when early voting and Election Day votes were tallied, and has received 13,351 mail-in/provisional ballot votes compared to 14,543 for Marc Elrich. Marc Elrich defeated David Blair by just 77 votes in 2018.

Per a tweet thread (seen below) by Steve Bohnel: In a presser, @DrZ_ElectionNut provided some numbers on the count… keep in mind these are all ballots, not just Democratic:
1) 30,218 ballots have been canvassed and sent to state board to post vote results
2) 32,312 mail-in ballots through USPS (more on that in a bit) 3) 36,663 from ballot drop boxes (Zelaya said this number is pretty firm, although it could change)
4) The number of provisional ballots is 8,030 ballots (these will be canvassed on Wednesday)

Approximately 115,000 mail-in ballots were sent to voters in Montgomery County. According the State Board of Elections, there were 25,453 Democratic mail-in ballots received by the county when polls closed (all ballot drop off boxes were also  locked shut on Tuesday at 8pm). Ballots are still coming in via the mail and will be counted as long as the envelope was postmarked by July 19 and arrives by July 29. A final result could take days due to how close the race is and the amount of ballots left to count. Additionally, a close race can lead to a recount, which would cause the official result to take longer.