Elections

State legislators are trying to make it easier for students at Maryland colleges and universities and members of the military to vote via a bill legislators announced Wednesday and is expected to be introduced after the General Assembly convenes next week.

Several jurisdictions, including Baltimore County, were not able to release results on election night. State Board of Elections officials say this was because of difficulties with transferring data from thumb drives. 

Local elections boards store data from ballot scanners on thumb drives, then transfer them to the state’s central voting database. 

More than 427,000 Marylanders voted as of 6:30 p.m. Tuesday and State Board of Elections officials say the counting will be far from over Tuesday night. 

Nikki Charlson, the board’s deputy administrator said ballots will be counted through at least Nov. 13.

  With COVID-19 cases rising, the Maryland State Board of Elections has released instructions on how to vote if you are in the hospital or under quarantine. 

You might not be 100% safe from COVID-19 if you’re voting early this week. But you can still vote in-person while minimizing risk. 

Dr. Daniel Morgan is a professor of epidemiology & public health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

In an interview for WYPR’s podcast The Daily Dose, he said he voted by mail because it’s easier, but would still feel comfortable voting at the polls. 

Voting rights advocates are worried that the formerly incarcerated are being denied the right to vote in this election.

They point to Latasha Fason, who received a letter from the Baltimore City Board of Elections dated Oct. 10 saying she could not vote because she’d been convicted of a crime.

But Fason, a member of Out For Justice, a Baltimore-based grassroots organization led by formerly and currently incarcerated individuals, says she had served her time when she registered to vote. 

The first of two statewide ballot questions this year could create a significant shift in power in Annapolis by allowing the General Assembly to move money around within the governor’s proposed budget. The legislature debated the proposed amendment to the state constitution for more than two decades before sending it to voters this year.

The Maryland State Board of Elections is weighing a proposal to replace the small polling places that serve one or two voter precincts with a much smaller number of large vote centers. Local election officials are pushing the idea in response to a massive shortage of election judges and locations that can house polling sites.

A new poll from WYPR, The Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore shows Del. Nick Mosby, former councilman Carl Stokes and councilwoman Shannon Sneed packed tightly together in the Baltimore City council president Democratic primary race, and Comptroller Joan Pratt with a slight edge over councilman Bill Henry in an unprecedentedly heated race for comptroller.   

A new poll from WYPR, the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore shows former mayor Sheila Dixon, Mary Miller and City Council President Brandon Scott in a statistical three-way tie in the Baltimore City mayoral Democratic primary race, with 22% of voters still undecided just two weeks shy of the election. 

“A couple of candidates could transcend, depending on how things go,” said Steve Raabe, the owner of OpinionWorks, which conducted the poll. “This is a race that really any one of three or four people could still win.”

Voters in Maryland’s Seventh Congressional District headed to the polls Tuesday to choose someone to fill the remainder of the term of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings.

But the turn-out was extremely light in an election conducted almost completely by mail-in ballot.

On Tuesday, the state of Maryland will do something it’s never done before: conduct an election almost completely by mail. Ballots for the 7th congressional district special election to fill the remainder of the late Elijah Cummings’ term in Congress must be postmarked on the 28th or placed in a drop box by 8 p.m. Tuesday. 

Gov. Larry Hogan decided to hold the election by mail last month in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which has closed businesses and forced schools to hold remote classes for an indefinite period of time.

Voters in Maryland’s June 2 primaries will be sent mail-in ballots, while some will have the option of casting a ballot on election day at one to four polling places per county, the Maryland State Board of Elections said in a Thursday afternoon meeting.

The decision is a departure from last week’s meeting, in which the board recommended there be no in-person voting in June because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

Gov. Larry Hogan issued a proclamation Tuesday that moves the April 28 Maryland primary elections to June 2 due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

The decision affects both Maryland’s presidential and local primaries, including primaries for mayor, city council president and other offices in Baltimore City.  Early voting will begin May 21 and run through May 28.

The 7th congressional district special election to fill the remainder of the late Elijah Cummings’ term will still be held in April, using solely mail-in ballots.

Almost 40% of Democratic primary voters say they’re unsure who they’ll pick to become the next Baltimore City Council President. But among those who say they have decided, Delegate Nick Mosby has a nine-point advantage, a new poll released by WYPR, the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore finds. 

Mosby enjoyed 26% support in the poll, followed by former City Councilman Carl Stokes with 17%.

The race to win the Democratic primary for Baltimore City mayor is defined by a large pool of undecided voters, with former mayor Shelia Dixon enjoying a small lead, followed by Brandon Scott and Thiru Vignarajah, according to a new poll from WYPR, The Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore.

The polls opened to some light rain Tuesday morning in the special primary election to fill the late Congressman Elijah Cummings’ seat representing Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. One West Baltimore elementary school saw a slow but steady stream of voters, though not everyone had their minds made up before casting ballots.

 Days after the emotional funeral of congressman and civil rights icon Elijah Cummings, Governor Larry Hogan announced a Feb. 4 special primary to fill his seat – and Democratic candidates in the deep-blue 7th congressional district were off to the races. 

“The whole race has been very fast. It's been emotional,” Martha McKenna, a longtime Democratic campaign consultant and advisor to Maya Rockeymore Cummings, said. “It's been the kind of race where people talking to each other about... why they're supporting individual candidates has a lot of meaning because the whole election has come so quickly, over the holidays and into the new year.”

After months of speculation, Baltimore City Council President Brandon Scott has officially entered the 2020 mayoral race, becoming the first elected official to do so.

The 35-year-old announced his campaign in north Baltimore on Friday morning, surrounded by family members and a group of leaders from the second district, which he represented as a councilman, as well as other city leaders.

Despite their growing numbers in the U.S. population, Latino voters turn out in notoriously low numbers on Election Day. WYPR went looking for Latino voters at polls on Tuesday to see who showed up and who they voted for.

A federal court in Baltimore threw out Maryland’s congressional district map on Wednesday as unconstitutional. The three-judge panel gave state lawmakers until March to submit new districts.

As voters head to the polls starting Thursday for early voting, they will be asked to approve an amendment to the state constitution to allow citizens to register to vote on Election Day.

An ad released this week by Gov. Larry Hogan’s campaign spends four minutes lauding the governor’s accomplishments on more than a dozen transportation projects.

Through a series of television news clips and video of press conferences, the ad describes how Hogan advanced efforts to widen I-270, the Capital Beltway, the Baltimore Beltway and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway; extended the I-95 North toll lanes; and lowered tolls — among other things.

Let’s say you buy a new TV for $500 dollars. Maryland’s current 6-percent sales tax would add $30 on top of that.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ben Jealous announced Thursday that if elected, he would cut the state sales tax to 5.75 percent, saving you $1.25 on that TV purchase.

While Republicans and Democrats in Washington continue to snipe at each other over what the president did or didn’t say, or whether Russia interfered in the 2016 elections, recent events have led two Maryland lawmakers to reach across the partisan divide.

It was a little more than a week ago that the FBI told Maryland officials that a Russian-backed firm owns the servers where much of the state’s election data is stored. John Delaney, a Democratic Congressman from Montgomery County, says that felt like a punch to the gut.