Election Day Observations

Though he was greatly outspent by the sitting judges throughout the primary campaign, yesterday Clarke Ahlers seemed to have a volunteer at every polling station, even the remote ones like Worthington Elementary School. In fact, when I voted at Worthington, Ahlers was the ONLY candidate with a volunteer working the polling place. Later in the day, whenever I passed a polling location in my travels around HoCo, I could spot a Ahlers volunteer in their trademark white t-shirts.

That was impressive. Hopefully those supporters will stay engaged in the loco politico scene even though their guy lost.

Even though she dropped out almost at the beginning of the campaign and never participated in any of the public forums, Kelly Casey Van Horn still managed to get over 1,500 votes. Either she has that many friends or 1.87% of the people who went out of their way to vote yesterday had no idea what they were doing.

It was a bad day for candidates from Elkridge. All three Elkridge candidates, Leslie Kornreich, Olga Butler and Corey Andrews were defeated.

While I successfully picked five of the six winners in the BOE primary, I grossly underestimated the strength of Ann De Lacy. I had her finishing fifth but she came in second, garnering almost a thousand more votes than popular incumbent Ellen Flynn Giles who came in third. It turns out that the sixth spot was the hardest call. Early in the evening Patricia Gordon held a slim lead over Bob Ballinger with Allen Dyer not that far behind. By 11:00 PM Bob had begun to pull ahead and with 97.4% of the votes counted he has a lead of 248 votes which will likely be enough for him to prevail even after absentee and provisional ballots are counted.

The Board of Elections needs to make their website more Apple friendly. I was having a beer (or two) with Tom Coale for the early returns using an iPad to access the Board of Elections website. The bottom two thirds of the results for the BOE races were cut off. Tom tried using his iPhone to access the site and got the same result. When we tried it with my Android phone we had no problem.