Frederick County school board candidates await counting of thousands of ballots

Jaime Kiersten Brennan and Colt Morningstar Black were ahead of three Frederick County Public Schools union-endorsed candidates in the school board primary as of Wednesday, but uncounted mail-in ballots could be the deciding factor in which six candidates advance to the Nov. 5 general election.

The gap between sixth place and seventh place was about 1,200, with more than 14,000 mail-in ballots that had been received as of Tuesday evening yet to be counted.

The Frederick County Board of Elections also will canvass provisional ballots — which are cast at the polls when there is a question about a voter’s registration — to determine how many of those to count.

As of Wednesday, Brennan — a certified public accountant and former chair for the Frederick County chapter of Moms for Liberty — had secured the most votes of any candidate at 10,192.

Black, a funeral director and former Republican candidate in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, was in second place with 9,380 votes.

Three FCPS union-endorsed candidates, also known as “apple ballot” candidates, were in third, fourth and fifth place as of Wednesday.

Josh Bokee, a former Frederick alderman, had 7,932 votes. Chad King Wilson Sr., a teacher at a Montgomery County high school, was in fourth place with 7,771 votes.

Janie Monier, a registered nurse and the president of the New Market Elementary School Parent Teacher Association, was in fifth place with 7,762 votes.

Tabitha McLoughlin, who said she is self-employed, was in a distant sixth place with 5,246 votes on Wednesday.

In seventh place was Veronica D. Lowe, a Maryland Department of Transportation official, with 4,044 votes as of Wednesday.

In a phone interview on Wednesday, Lowe said that she went to bed on Tuesday night thinking that she was no longer in the school board race. However, she felt more confident after waking up to a barrage of supportive text messages.

“For a moment, I forgot about all those additional ballots that I think could flip the vote,” Lowe said.

Those numbers reflect all 66 Election Day precincts, plus early voting and a small fraction of the mail-in ballots that were sent out ahead of the primary election.

MAIL-IN BALLOTS

Among the 499 mail-in ballots that had been counted as of Tuesday evening, Bokee was in the lead with 125 votes. Lowe was in second place with 113 votes, followed by Wilson with 111 votes and Monier with 107 votes.

Tied for fifth with 63 mail-in votes each were Allison Medrano, who dropped out of the school board race before primary Election Day, and Justin Smith.

Black, McLoughlin and Brennan were in ninth, 10th and 12th place with mail-in votes, respectively.

There were 17 candidates on the ballot, including Medrano.

Board of Education vote counts

A stacked bar chart showing vote counts in the Frederick County Board of Education primary as of Wednesday.

As of 5 p.m. on Tuesday, a total of 30,208 mail-in ballots had been sent out to voters in Frederick County, according to the State Board of Elections.

Of those, 17,889 were sent to registered Democrats, 7,052 were sent to registered Republicans and 5,267 were sent to other voters.

As of 5 p.m. on Tuesday, 14,915 completed mail-in ballots had been received by the Frederick County Board of Elections, including 9,700 Democratic ballots, 3,912 Republican ballots and 1,303 nonpartisan ballots.

The number of mail-in ballots received does not reflect ballots that were left in ballot drop boxes on Election Day or ballots that were received by the board through the mail on Wednesday, Deputy Election Director Anthony Gutierrez said in a phone interview.

Only 499 of the mail-in ballots received by the Frederick County Board of Elections had been counted as of Wednesday. Each ballot can contain up to three votes for school board candidates.

By law, mail-in ballots could not be counted on Wednesday.

Gutierrez said that the Frederick County Board of Elections aims to count at least another 5,000 on Thursday and will continue counting on Friday.

Gutierrez said he does not expect mail-in ballot counting to continue through the weekend, but the local board will know more about how quickly canvassing teams will progress by halfway through the day on Thursday.

In order to be counted, mail-in ballots had to be delivered to a ballot box, polling place or local board office by 8 p.m. on Tuesday — the close of polls on Election Day — or received by mail no later than 10 a.m. on May 24.

Local boards of elections will begin canvassing provisional ballots on May 22. The second and final canvass of mail-in ballots will be on May 24, which is also the day the results of the election are expected to be certified.