By Adam Pagnucco.
With early votes and election day votes counted, Marc Elrich leads David Blair by 452 votes to win the Democratic County Executive nomination. This would be a close margin in a House of Delegates race but it’s incredibly close for a county-wide race. The final outcome will now be decided by absentee and provisional ballots. Does Blair have a chance or will Elrich hold on to win?
According to Bethesda Magazine, the county’s Board of Elections received 4,900 Democratic absentee ballots as of Monday. In addition, 3,614 provisional ballots were cast but that total includes all parties. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that 2,500 of those provisional ballots came from Democrats. If there are only 5,000 Democratic absentee ballots received, that is 7,500 outstanding votes. A higher end assumption would be that 7,500 Democratic absentee ballots come in, resulting in 10,000 outstanding votes.
Let’s do a math exercise on the final outcome of the absentee and provisional votes. In the first scenario, let’s assume that the percentages of three categories – Blair’s percentage, Elrich’s percentage and the percentage of all the other candidates – exactly match the shares recorded during early and election day voting. In this scenario, Elrich picks up between 30 and 40 votes more than Blair and he would win.
Now let’s do a scenario in which Blair wins. Since Blair and Elrich are the top two and no one else is even close, it’s the margin between them that will determine the victor. In this second scenario, we will hold the percentage of all the other candidates constant and merely adjust the totals for Blair and Elrich. Adding 3.3 points to Blair and subtracting 3.3 points from Elrich produces a net gain for Blair of 465 votes in a 7,500 vote universe, enough to win. That margin would go up to 620 votes in a 10,000 vote universe. But note that this scenario requires Blair to lead Elrich by 6.2 points among these groups, a very different result than Elrich’s 0.4 point lead in early and election day votes.
We adjusted the percentage for the other candidates up and down and didn’t find much change in the margin Blair needs, which is more than six points over Elrich. Again, this is a departure from the cumulative early vote and election day totals.
Will it happen? Readers, you tell us!