Election Results Delayed In MD's 5 Largest Jurisdictions: Report

Updated at 4:25 p.m.

ANNAPOLIS, MD — Election results are delayed in Maryland's most-populated areas. Though 19 counties posted their full Election Day counts overnight, five jurisdictions are lagging.

Election officials said a technical issue is slowing vote counts in Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Montgomery County and Prince George's County. Baltimore County did not report any Election Day results until Wednesday morning, they added.

The Board of Elections told reporters that Anne Arundel County and Montgomery County will likely post their Election Day tallies Wednesday night. The other three jurisdictions will have to wait until Thursday.

The problem stems from ballot scanners and their associated thumb drives.

After a voter makes their picks, a scanner reads their ballot. Each scanner stores that data on a thumb drive.

Every poll has multiple scanners. Because counties have several election sites, jurisdictions can have hundreds of thumb drives.

Each drive took 8 to 10 minutes to upload to the state's vote count, election officials said in a late-night press release. The lengthy process led the Board of Elections to pause vote counts at 1 a.m. Wednesday. Election judges resumed the process in the morning

"It was clear that they would not finish last night," said Nikki Charlson, deputy director of the Maryland State Board of Elections.

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This issue would not happen in a typical election, Charlson suggested. In a non-pandemic year, citizens must vote at their assigned precinct. This system allows the thumb drives to report with certainty where each vote comes from.

Like most things, coronavirus changed that. Gov. Larry Hogan's emergency declaration allowed the state to pivot to a voting center model. This year, Marylanders could vote at any poll in their jurisdiction.

That meant thumb drives could no longer assume which precinct a voter lives in. Now, election officials must answer a set of repetitive questions for every thumb drive they import into the state's vote tallies.

The officials' responses tell the system that it's OK that some precincts are not represented in the data. The process disproportionately affected larger jurisdictions because they have more voting centers and more thumb drives to transfer.

By Wednesday at 9:30 a.m., the jurisdictions had counted a fraction of their thumb drives:

• Anne Arundel County: 15 of 160 drives tallied
• Baltimore City: 12 of 80 drives tallied
• Baltimore County: Zero of 128 drives tallied
• Montgomery County: 42 of 292 drives tallied
• Prince George's County: Six of 128 drives tallied

The Board of Elections saw a similar problem when counting early voting results, Charlson said. Those drives took 2 or 3 minutes to upload, however, making them less problematic.

Charlson added that early voting took place over a longer period, allowing voters from more areas to hit each poll. When more towns were represented on a thumb drive, election officials had fewer absent precincts to approve when tallying its votes. That shortened the delays for early voting results.

Though the thumb drive process has slowed vote tabulation, the Board of Elections still believes it is the best way to track ballots. Charlson noted that these problems have never popped up in a normal year.

She also said these manual uploads are safer than online submissions. The manual process requires a bipartisan pair of poll workers to collect the thumb drives and take them to their local Board of Elections. Charlson warned that submitting these files online could open the system to cyber threats.

"It is low-tech because that is the most secure way to transfer those results," Charlson said.

The Board of Elections eventually found a way to count one-page ballots quicker. That sped up the process in Anne Arundel County but left the others waiting.

Charlson said a different factor delayed Baltimore County, but it took some time to pinpoint the exact cause. By 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, it still wasn't clear what kept the county from reporting a single Election Day vote until the next morning.

Baltimore County's votes have since started to trickle in. Charlson told reporters at 3 p.m. that a county server crashed on election night, halting its vote tabulations. That problem has since been fixed, and votes are coming in.

Charlson reminds residents that only the Election Day counts are delayed. That data will be ready by Wednesday evening, she estimated.

Complete early voting data is available for every jurisdiction. Results are also posted for the mail-in ballots that have already been counted. The Board of Elections must finish its mail-in tallies by Nov. 13.

Despite the setbacks, the Associated Press already projected that former Vice President Joe Biden will win Maryland's 10 Electoral College votes. The publication also predicted re-election victories for all eight of Maryland's representatives in the U.S. House.

These are not official declarations, since the Maryland State Board of Elections has not yet counted all the ballots. These are merely projections from an unbiased source that is 99.8 percent accurate in its election predictions.

Marylanders can follow the preliminary vote counts for every race at this link, which will be updated each day at 4:30 p.m. The Board of Elections will only announce winners after it counts every vote.

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