Will Jawando is certified to run Maryland’s largest county. The voters who never got a ballot outnumber his vote total more than three to one.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Montgomery County — home to more than one million residents, the largest county budget in Maryland, and a school system of roughly 160,000 students — has effectively chosen its next county executive.
The final, certified tally: 52,738 votes.
The Montgomery County Board of Elections unanimously certified the results on July 8, closing the book two and a half weeks after Election Day. Will Jawando won the Democratic nomination for county executive with 40.15 percent of 131,363 ballots cast in a five-candidate field — the widest margin of victory in an open county executive primary in nearly two decades, by his own campaign’s count. Andrew Friedson finished second with 44,518 votes, Evan Glass third with 29,005. Jawando still faces Republican Esther Wells on November 3, but in a county where the certified Democratic primary drew more than eleven times as many ballots as the Republican primary — 131,363 to 11,271 — the general election is a formality in all but name. Jawando has already begun a transition into office, telling reporters he’s focused on building the government he’ll lead in December.
He is almost certainly right about winning. And that is the story.
The Math
Start with the official numbers. As of the State Board of Elections’ most recent published county-level registration count (October 2024), Montgomery County had 683,515 registered voters:
- 403,843 Democrats
- 170,306 unaffiliated voters
- 98,946 Republicans
- Roughly 10,400 registered with minor parties — Libertarian, Green, and others
Now line those figures up against the certified result.
The locked-out unaffiliated bloc is more than three times the size of the winning vote total.
Jawando’s 52,738 winning votes represent about 7.7 percent of the county’s registered voters — and roughly 5 percent of the people who live here. He won a plurality, not a majority: nearly six in ten Democratic primary voters chose someone else.
Meanwhile, 170,306 unaffiliated voters — plus the minor-party registrants alongside them — received no ballot in the race at all. Maryland runs closed primaries. Unaffiliated voters could vote only in the nonpartisan Board of Education contests. In the election that actually determines who governs Montgomery County, they were spectators.
The locked-out unaffiliated bloc is more than three times the size of the winning vote total.
It gets more uncomfortable. Unaffiliated voters are Montgomery County’s second-largest political bloc — more than 70,000 stronger than the entire registered Republican Party in the county. The GOP, for all its irrelevance in MoCo general elections, at least got a primary. The county’s second-largest group of voters did not.
“They Could Have Re-Registered”
The standard rebuttal arrives on schedule every cycle: unaffiliated voters had until June 2 to switch their registration and claim a Democratic ballot. That is true. It is also the whole problem.
The registration deadline is a fact. It is not a defense.
The remedy on offer is that a voter must join a private political organization to gain access to a taxpayer-funded public election. Montgomery County’s unaffiliated voters paid — through the same county and state taxes as everyone else — to administer a primary they were barred from voting in. That grievance is no longer just an argument on X. Five unaffiliated voters — Serena Bryson, Kimberle Fields, Amber Ivey, Robert Sartwell, and Dona Sauerburger, represented by former Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford — sued the State Board of Elections in May 2025, arguing the state cannot constitutionally fund elections that exclude a quarter of its registered voters. An Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge dismissed the case in November; it is now on appeal, with the Attorney General’s office filing its response in June and both sides awaiting a hearing date. Ivey put the argument plainly days before this primary: no one should have to join a private political party to fully participate in a public election. Statewide, the excluded class now exceeds one million voters — roughly a quarter of Maryland’s electorate — and grew by more than 42,000 in the past year alone.
The registration deadline is a fact. It is not a defense. “You may participate if you first join one of two private clubs” is precisely the arrangement under challenge.
Why It Matters More Here Than Almost Anywhere
Closed primaries exist across Maryland. What makes Montgomery County the starkest case is that the primary is not a preliminary round — it is the election. Marc Elrich won the county executive’s office in 2022 by 32 votes in the primary; the general was never in doubt. This cycle, the entire field of consequence — five Democrats, seventeen Democratic at-large council candidates — competed for a nomination that functions as the office itself.
That means every structural complaint about county governance runs through the same bottleneck. The next executive will confront a projected $293 million structural deficit in fiscal 2028 — a gap the council’s own adopted FY27 budget grew, by papering over ongoing costs with one-time revenue, according to reporting on the May budget vote. That $7.9 billion budget passed 9-2; the two no votes were Dawn Luedtke and Andrew Friedson, the runner-up in this primary, who objected that the plan spends money that “simply won’t exist” after June 2027. Jawando’s stated answer is an income tax increase on higher earners rather than a residential property tax hike, alongside restored school funding and an extended moratorium on data center development. Voters may judge those positions well or badly in time — but the judging electorate has already been reduced to the 131,363 people who cast Democratic ballots in the executive race, in a county of a million. The other 900,000-plus residents, including 170,000-plus registered voters with no party, will live under the results without ever having weighed in on the only contest that counted.
This is not an argument about Will Jawando, who won the race in front of him under the rules as written, and won it cleanly by MoCo’s recent standards. It is an argument about the rules. MDBayNews’ prior coverage of Jawando’s public financing structure and Working Families Party transfer documented how campaigns are built for this electorate — because this electorate is the only one that matters.
The Fix Nobody in Power Wants
Montgomery County offers the cleanest demonstration in Maryland of what the system produces: a government of a million people, chosen by five percent of them.
MDBayNews has previously laid out the structural options — open primaries, semi-closed primaries, top-two, Alaska-style top-four, and this publication’s own Third Primary proposal, which would give unaffiliated voters a dedicated primary track with a guaranteed general election slot. [Maryland Has a Million Voters With No Primary. Here’s How to Fix That.] Reasonable people can rank those reforms differently. What no honest observer can defend is the status quo’s math: a one-party county where the decisive election excludes a quarter of registered voters by design, and where the winner’s mandate — 52,738 votes — would not fill FedEx Field even three-quarters of the way.
Both parties in Annapolis benefit from closed primaries, which is why neither has moved to change them. The plaintiffs’ lawsuit may force the question. Until then, Montgomery County offers the cleanest demonstration in Maryland of what the system produces: a government of a million people, chosen by five percent of them.
The votes were counted fairly. The election was decided long before anyone voted.
Sources: Montgomery County Board of Elections, certified 2026 primary results (July 8, 2026); Maryland State Board of Elections, October 2024 official voter registration statistics; WTOP; WUSA9; NBC4 Washington; The Banner; Maryland Matters; candidate and Working Families Party statements, June–July 2026.
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