Following delay caused by misplaced thumb drives, all Baltimore's in-person voting totals are posted

BALTIMORE -- Primary election results from all of Baltimore City's 296 precincts are online Wednesday evening after a dozen misplaced thumb drives caused a delay in the release of the tally.

There are at least 20,000 mail-in votes to be counted in Baltimore City's Democratic primary. They cannot be opened until Thursday.  

Earlier in the day, Armstead Jones, elections director for the Baltimore City Board of Elections, reported a dozen thumb drives with results from Tuesday's primary were misplaced. Later, he said the board recovered all but three or four.

By Wednesday night, Jones confirmed to WJZ all 12 had been retrieved.

About 8:40 p.m., the state board of elections uploaded the full count. 

In two of the most closely contested races, Ivan Bates maintained a 4,149-vote lead over Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Sam Cogen is up just 188 votes on Baltimore Sheriff John Anderson.

Baltimore Democrats, who make up 77% of the city's eligible voters, overwhelmingly backed author and nonprofit CEO Wes Moore, giving him 41% of the vote. Former Obama administration official Tom Perez was second with 26%, and Comptroller Peter Franchot was right behind him at 23%.

John King, a former U.S. Education Secretary under Obama, was a distant fourth at about 3%.

Each ballot scanner has a thumb drive -- no different than the ones people uses in their computers -- to store vote data, and judges are supposed to return the drives at the end of the night, Jones said.

But officials realized several were not turned in. 

"They must have just misplaced it when they were packing up, that's what it looks like to me," said Philo Amaechi, a Baltimore City election judge.

Amaechi worked Tuesday's primary election at a voting precinct in Little Italy.

She said she could understand how something could get temporarily misplaced at the end of a long day.

"People just wanna go home," said Amaechi, "I'm sure it should be there, but it's very easy if you're rushing and this is your first time or you're not sure of something."

Jones said the board realized on Tuesday evening the drives were not turned in. On Wednesday morning about 8 a.m., workers in the board's warehouse started checking all the scanners and a black case with supplies for judges, he said.

Election data would not have been lost had all the drives not been recovered, he said. Officials could have uploaded the data from the scanners to new thumb drives.

Several lawmakers expressed frustration over the delays and missing drives.

City Councilwoman Odette Ramos tweeted she plans to call for an oversight hearing of the Baltimore City Board of Election's at the council's upcoming meeting on Monday.