How The Banner is counting Maryland’s 2026 election results

Counting votes isn’t easy.

More than 4.3 million registered voters are eligible to cast their ballots in Maryland’s general election. Voters across the state will decide who will serve as Maryland’s governor, whether the state will redraw its congressional districts and whether or not to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to fund local initiatives.

The tall task of making sure every Marylander’s vote is counted requires a vast, comprehensive network of machines, data professionals and volunteer staff.

To ensure the best possible experience for our readers on election night and beyond, The Banner is beefing up our presentation of election results.

Our goal: Deliver the results of hundreds of elections as accurately, as quickly and with as much detail as possible.

While votes are being counted

For each race we cover, we collect and publish election results live, minimizing the time between ballots being counted at thousands of local precincts and appearing on your screen.

While the election is administered by the Maryland Board of Elections in partnership with 24 local boards of elections in Baltimore and each Maryland county, our election results pages draw on multiple data sources.

When possible, we rely on tallies collected by the The Associated Press, which has deployed an army of vote count reporters and vote entry clerks to gather and verify results from precincts around the state for races such as those for governor and county executive. The AP also utilizes results collected and posted from official sources, like county or state boards of elections.

The Banner is among the hundreds of news organizations around the world relying on AP to determine when certain races have been won. When its team of election analysts and researchers determines that a race tabulated by the AP has been decided, we will add a checkmark signifying a winner to our race results.

Some of the results in our stories are sourced directly from the State Board of Elections, which provides us with top-line results — total votes for each candidate across the entire race — through a public web address, and, exclusive to The Banner, at the precinct level through secure data transfer.

In some circumstances, our results pages will rely on a combination of AP and State Board of Elections data. For example, AP collects top-line results for congressional races, but for more granular precinct-level results, we rely on the State Board of Elections’ precinct-level data.

The Banner will collect and update top-line results for every race once per minute. Precinct results will be updated as state elections officials provide updated tallies via a secure transfer. We’ll keep you updated as we pull new results with a progress bar that will tell you when we last received new vote totals.

The results displayed are considered preliminary and subject to change as additional votes are counted and recounted. The final tally goes through risk-limiting audits conducted by local boards of election across the state and an independent automated post-election tabulation audit conducted statewide. For race results sourced from the State Board of Elections tallies, The Banner does not declare a winner until the agency’s audit is complete and election results have been certified.

You can find a full list of races we’re covering and the data sources we are relying on for each of them here.

What we will show you and what we won’t

For each of the 300+ races we are following, The Banner provides vote counts and the percentage of the vote that each candidate is receiving.

Our results pages cover statewide contests, races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, state legislature and local offices in 9 different localities including — for the first time ever — Harford, Carroll and Frederick counties.

In some cases, we provide a geographic breakdown of votes through maps.

In statewide races, like governor, maps follow the number of votes cast for each candidate in each of Maryland’s 24 counties. In races decided at the county level, like county executive, we will follow the percentage of the vote that candidates receive across each precinct.

A few races, including some for certain U.S. congressional seats, will span multiple counties. In these cases, we will display the percentage of the vote that each candidate received in every precinct where voters can cast a ballot in the race.

We include plain-language explanations of each ballot question, from proposed constitutional amendments to local ordinances.

We will not display raw vote counts at the precinct level to avoid potentially biasing any of the independent audits that the state requires for election certification. Our election result maps will update to display complete precinct vote totals once election results have been certified by the state.

Who is running?

We spent months compiling the state’s most detailed voter guide, asking hundreds of candidates their stances on issues from redistricting to money in politics.

More than a dozen Banner reporters and editors also contributed important context on each race to our results pages. On each page we’ve identified several “key races” likely to be interesting or consequential, and included details on what is at stake in each contest.

Hundreds of races mean thousands of candidates with different names and nicknames. To remain consistent with the ballot, candidates’ names appear as they were published by state election officials.

We’re sorry if they didn’t record your name correctly.