Visual Breakdown Of The Ballot Battle For County Executive Between David Blair & Marc Elrich – Montgomery County MD 2022 Democratic Primary – 7/25/2022

Introduction (Read this first)

These charts are a little different than the previous post about the County Executive Race which was about projections. We will get back into projections as more mail ins come in.

In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy our new visualization’s attempt to break down the Blair / Elrich head to head battle to help you understand these daily numbers and changes in the race.

Updates And Remaining Votes To Count

  • There were some updates to the day of voting totals today which favored David Blair by 135 votes.
    • This is part of the reason for his surge today, not just his mail in ballots since the margins are so small.
    • This isn’t seen in the charts because they include that update in original votes from 7/19.
  • So far to date there are at least 47,084 Democratic mail-ins received in Montgomery County and 34,703 mail-in votes tallied for the 4 County Executive candidates.
    • There is known to be a backlog in time between information at County board of elections and that information getting to the state log. So the number is likely much higher.
    • There are another 8030 Provisional ballots that have not been counted yet.
    • Any ballots received by 7/29/2022 that are postmarked by 8pm 7/19 will still count.

You can see Montgomery County Election Data here


Total Votes and Daily Votes Over Time

The idea behind this chart is to visualize how each daily drop of mail-in votes affects the overall picture of votes.

The solid filled in parts are the Percent of Daily Votes with their axis on the left.

The lines are the Percent of Total Votes with their axis on the right.

The Orange (Elrich) and Blue (Blair) mirror each other because they represent how each did compared to the other – A positive percent above the line represents what percent more votes they had that day or total. A negative percent represents they had less votes than the other.

Figure 1: A chart with 4 items David Blair (Daily %), David Blair (Total %), Marc Elrich (Daily %), Marc Elrich (Total %). The solid filled in parts are the Percent of Total Votes with their axis on the left.
The lines are the Percent of Daily Votes with their axis on the right.

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Cumulative Votes Over Time Comparison

This chart is a bit simpler than the other one.

It shows how each of Marc Elrich and David Blair have massed up their current vote totals side by side with each color representing the number of votes counted for them each time period.

Figure 2: The chart shows how each of Marc Elrich and David Blair have massed up their current vote totals side by
side with each color representing the number of votes counted for them each time period.

Conclusion / Prediction

This race is still likely coming down to the wire and we may not know for several weeks (especially if it is close enough for a recount like in 2018).

I was expecting this turn on mail-ins toward Blair today based on the trends and I expect that to continue over the next few days and Blair to build on his lead (assuming the trends continue).

However, I think that as we get closer towards the end of the counting, Elrich will come back with an edge with presumably more down county overall votes to count.

Prediction is that it’s going to come down to how big a lead Blair gets the next few days and how much Elrich can come back.


More Reading

Did you like this analysis? See our previous analysis of the Montgomery County County Executive Race looking at projections of remaining mail-in ballots.

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