The first tranche of mail ballots is in and they were very good for incumbent County Executive Marc Elrich.

Going into tonight, Elrich trailed by 1,191 votes. The addition of just 4,101 valid votes from mail ballots has now cut David Blair’s lead down to 550 votes. Blair added just 1,376 (33.6%) votes to 2,017 (49.2%) for Elrich. Tens of thousands more mail ballots still have yet to be counted along with provisional ballots.

Though excellent news for Elrich, a strong dose of caution is merited. If the Board of Elections is indeed counting ballots from earliest to latest received, this means that their composition could well change. In other words, this is not a random sample of mail ballots.

Folks, like last time, it looks like we’re going to have wait to know the result.