Former Mayor Sheila Dixon announced she will not concede in the Democratic mayoral primary until the final outstanding batch of mail-in ballots are counted. The Associated Press called the race for Mayor Brandon Scott around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.
“In respect to all who voted, I’ll be waiting for the final outcome of the mail-in ballots before I make any further statements on the outcome of the mayoral primary,” she said in a Wednesday statement.
The AP calls a race when candidates trailing the top contender no longer have a path to victory based on the remaining number of outstanding votes.
The latest round of 14,853 mail-in ballots canvassed Thursday increased Scott’s lead over Dixon.
Scott secured about 51% of the preliminary vote, while Dixon had around 41.29%, according to the most recently available set of unofficial results. That translates to 40,945 votes for Scott and 32,007 for Dixon.
Elections workers will take Friday off and resume counting on Monday, when they are slated to count approximately 9,000 ballots.
Elections officials count mail-in ballots in two waves. The first portion are ballots that were returned before a deadline last week; their results were released on election day. The rest — about 25,000, according to city elections director Armstead Jones — are now being counted at the elections warehouse in West Baltimore. Results will be certified on May 24.
Dixon earned about 45% of the first wave of mail-in ballots, while Scott earned about 40%. Thiru Vignarajah earned about 10%; he dropped out of the race to endorse Dixon before early voting started, but after voters could return their mail-in ballots.
Dixon would need to earn a significantly higher percentage of mail-in ballots to bridge the gap between her and Scott. In 2020, Scott won a majority of mail-in ballots.
A Banner analysis of preliminary election data found that Scott had massive margins over Dixon in the city’s majority-white precincts. He was in near-lockstep to Dixon in the city’s majority-Black precincts.
