BALTIMORE (WMAR) — Almost a week later and ballot counting continues for the Presidential Primary election in Baltimore City.
"Over the last several days, we have brought in additional 10-12 people and judges to help assist with the counting," said Election Director Armstead Jones.
Monday, the Baltimore City Board of Elections held a meeting over the phone so board members could get an update on the process.
Jones said they scanned about 45,000 ballots over the weekend and they have about 12,000 more ballots to count. With the two democrat front runners for mayor within 400 votes of each other, standings could continue to change over the next few days.
Many of those left to count are email ballots: ballots that were emailed to voters because they never got one in the mail. The voters had to print them so they are not on the same paper as the official ballots. Now election employees and judges have to recreate each ballot onto an official one that can be scanned; a similar process to what they had to do with the District 1 ballots.
"All of those ballots have to be recreated which will slow down the process. We have about 15 teams here recreating those ballots today, and we found out that the process recreating even with the team where one person is calling off what needs to be marked and then at the end it’s reviewed by the other person to make sure it has been recreated correctly, that it averages 300-400 of those a day," said Jones.
Jones said they are on track to finish counting by Friday, which is the certification date.
