Mitchell,Outten and Taylor await final count in close SBY Mayor Race

SALISBURY, Md – The Salisbury Mayoral is heading down to the wire, with Randy Taylor leading by less than 100 votes over Megan Outten, with Jermichael Mitchell in 3rd place with nearly 100 votes behind her.

Outten currently holds 976 votes, and told 47ABC on election night, she believes she will be able to top Randy Taylor’s 1,032 votes with absentee ballots.

However, Randy Taylor says he is also confident in his turn saying that he believes by going door to door, many of those ballots will break in his favor.

“I can say that when I was banging on doors, there were a lot of people that said they voted for me and voted absentee, so I suspected there would be a reasonable, you know, a reasonable absentee ballot level so, yeah, I’m looking to hear from those voters and I think it goes my way,” he said.

Taylor says he is proud of the campaign season and credits his push for accountability in town government and decision-making with having those issues be a key part of all 3 candidate’s campaigns.

“I have a finance background, I think they were looking for fiscal responsibility and haven’t seen a lot of that lately, so as a general statement, I think that transparency and fiscal responsibility were energizing voters,” he said.

Mitchell tells 47ABC he is proud of his campaign as well, and believes his calls for more transparent and inclusive government brought out voters as well. He tells 47ABC he is also awaiting the final count for the ballots but does not believe he has a likely path forward to victory at this time.

Mitchell says he does believe likely voters were split between him and Outten, the sum total of which exceeds Randy Taylor’s votes, but does not believe that he should have withdrawn from the race.

“We were in the race since February, running against Jack Heath, Megan was a last-minute candidate, so we say our votes for Megan would have caused us to beat Mr. Taylor,” he said adding “When you look at it way, she was put in last minute, she was actually running in the District three so if things had stayed the course like they were, we would have Democrats sitting in the seat,” he said.

Those absentee and mail-in ballots are set to be counted Thursday morning with results set to be certified on the 17th.

All current numbers being released by the WCBOE are unofficial counts, and a state-run recount is mandated if the margin is within 5 percent of the total votes cast.