Elections officials in Frederick County, Maryland, need to recount ballots after finding a discrepancy in last month's primary election, they said.
The Board of Elections released a statement Monday saying, "Out of an abundance of caution the Frederick County Board of Elections will vote to decertify the results of the 2022 Primary Election and rescan the mail-in and provisional ballots."
Elections officials believe human error was to blame, and they say there was no malicious intent.
About 100 ballots may have been counted twice. This could have a big impact because one county council race is separated by just three votes.
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The Board of Elections plans to vote to decertify the results by midweek and then rescan hundreds of provisional and mail-in ballots.
"In preparing to do a recount in the County Council District 3 Democratic primary contest, we found over the weekend that there were some discrepancies between the votes cast and the ballots we had on hand in a couple of categories, the mail-in ballots and the provisional ballots cast in the primary election," said Anthony Gutierrez, Frederick County deputy election director.
The numbers were not adding up, so the board decided to throw out all the results and rescan the ballots.
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"We had canvassers come in to check the envelopes and check the validity, and the board approved those ballots to be scanned, so it’s in the process where it was being scanned, we think, possibly human error, inadvertently, may have scanned ballots twice, so again, [in an] overabundance of caution, we're going to ask the board to let us do it again," Gutierrez said.
The board of elections will rescan about 17,000 ballots, likely on Thursday.
Jazmin Di Cola was running against District 3 Councilmember M.C. Keegan-Ayer and came out on top, but that result is now in question.
Keegan-Ayer had already asked for a recount.
News4 could not reach Keegan-Ayer for comment, but we did get a statement from a lawyer representing Jazmin Di Cola, which reads: "It's disappointing that the County Board of Elections made a mistake in their vote tally and isn't able to identify whether it has anything to do with the vote count in District 3. But, it's important to acknowledge that the board is doing the right thing here by rescanning the ballots to be sure that the vote count is correct and accurately reflects the will of the voters."
As for the process that may have led to the scanning of ballots twice: "Certainly, we're very sensitive to the public confidence in the process," Gutierrez said. "Again we will be doing a full review when time permits."
No other races in the county are nearly as close as the one between Di Cola and Keegan-Ayer.
