Politics

The countdown to Election Day 2024 is on, and election officials in Baltimore County have been working for months to ensure a smooth voting process. Elections officials said this is like the Super Bowl for them. On Monday, the Baltimore County Board of Elections office was already abuzz with activity, counting mail-in ballots.

You’ve researched the candidates and the issues, you’ve blocked off time after work to go vote — but do you know how you are getting to the polls on Election Day? If not, the Maryland Transit Administration may have you covered. Core Baltimore public transit service will be free on Tuesday to help voters get to where they need to cast their ballots, the agency has announced.

More than one in five Maryland voters are choosing not to register with a party — a 25% increase since 2012, according to an analysis of state voter data, as more voters express dissatisfaction with Democrats and Republicans. Those growing unaffiliated voters could be crucial in Maryland’s U.S. Senate race, in which Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, and Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan have told voters the race is a choice between the consequences of party control and independence.

A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final push across a handful of states on the eve of Election Day. Kamala Harris will spend all of Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the largest prize among the states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome.

While the winners of many political races will likely be called on Election Night, according to elections officials it may take several more days before we know the results of Maryland’s tightest races — especially with a few hundred thousand mail-in ballots left to count. This election cycle saw a strong turnout for early in-person voting, and people voting by mail have requested more than 880,000 ballots.

More than one-third of Maryland’s 4.2 million registered have already cast their ballots in advance of the Nov. 5 election, with nearly 1 million cast in early voting that ended Thursday and another 568,359 mail-in ballots returned so far. Those numbers do not include more than 300,000 mail-in ballots that were requested by voters but have not yet been returned, according to the most recent data from the Maryland State Board of Elections.

Maryland has paid $5.4 million to the Internal Revenue Service after a rare IRS audit of the state found it owed millions of dollars in taxes in 2020. Rachel Sessa, deputy comptroller for law and oversight, said during a meeting of the state Board of Public Works Wednesday the IRS audit of tax year 2020 found the stated owed over $16 million, but “staff within the Office of the Comptroller and other state agencies worked tirelessly to provide and obtain documentation to the IRS to significantly reduce the amount the state owes.”

If you’ve tuned into any coverage of the election this year, you’ve probably heard references to something called Project 2025. It’s become a bit of a shorthand for a larger proposed presidential transition plan for the next Republican president. Many of the plans for the next “conservative administration” that have been talked about come from a 900-plus-page book titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”