GLEN BURNIE, Md. – Anne Arundel election officials convened on Thursday morning for a rare purpose – an audit of votes from last week’s municipal primary.
They ultimately affirmed the original count, but only after a double-check to make sure they had it right.
“We’re back,” Eileen Leahy, chair of the Annapolis Board of Canvassers, said as they assembled. “We missed you.”
The unofficial results published by the City of Annapolis on the night of the election mistakenly assigned the votes for candidate Diesha Contee to candidate Craig Cussimanio.
“I’m happy they are going through the process,” said Contee, who showed up to the audit.
Contee says she was surprised when the unofficial results came out but came to the audit to see how the process went.
The process is just like a recount, with the exception that it was requested by the Board of Supervisors of Elections, not a candidate. Such audits are very uncommon in board history, officials told Capital News Service.
The Board of Canvassers checked all the ballots, including mail-in and provisional ballots, seven days after election night, which is when the error was found.
Around 24 hours after the official results went up, residents started voicing concerns. The error prompted the Board of Supervisors of Elections to ask for a hand-count audit of all the votes.
Under fluorescent lights, two Board of Elections staff members reopened the ballot bins from each ward. The staff donned rubber gloves and sat in teams of two to sift through the ballots. They determined the validity of the ballot and tallied them up.
Some voters fill the ballot out wrong, filling in two circles or drawing a line through it, said election officials. The job for the judges is to make sure each vote is counted correctly.
Once the votes were tallied, they went into a spreadsheet and compared to the tally from election night.
Going into the audit, board officials were pretty confident their count was right.
“The expectation is that the results will be the same,” said Mitchelle Stephenson, public information officer for the Board of Canvassers.
Their double-checking confirmed that correct tallies were posted in the official count on Tuesday.