OCEAN CITY — There might be a Knight on the Ocean City Council after the Nov. 3 municipal election, but it won’t be Mary.
With Tuesday’s filing deadline looming, the field of candidates for the Mayor and Council Election is rounding out with a few question marks remaining. The year, the mayor’s seat is up for election along with four at-large City Council seats currently occupied by Council Secretary Mary Knight and Councilmembers Dennis Dare, Tony DeLuca and John Gehrig. The other seats held by incumbents Lloyd Martin, Matt James and Mark Paddack are staggered and will come up for re-election in 2022.
Mayor Rick Meehan has filed for re-election and with the deadline looming on Tuesday, he remained unchallenged as of Monday. A relative newcomer to Ocean City, Daniel Hagan initially filed for the mayor’s seat last month, but later withdrew his candidacy for that position and filed instead for City Council.
Perhaps the biggest surprise thus far with a little over 24 hours until the filing deadline is Mary Knight is not seeking re-election. She has been on the council since 2006. Instead, her husband Frank Knight, a retired dentist, has filed for one of the four vacant seats. Frank Knight is active in the community and has served on various committees and task forces and currently serves on the Board of Port Wardens. He is also a fixture at Mayor and Council meetings.
Incumbents DeLuca and Gehrig have also formally filed for re-election ahead of Tuesday’s filing deadline. Incumbent Dennis Dare, the former long-time city manager, has not yet made his intentions known. Peter Buas, an attorney who grew up in the resort in his family’s hospitality business, was one of the first to file for one of the four contested seats. Rounding out the list thus far is the aforementioned Daniel Hagan and Nicholas Eastman.
After Tuesday’s candidate filing deadline, the next milestone on the ramp-up to the Nov. 3 election is the universal voter registration deadline, which allows individuals to vote in national, state, county and local elections, set for Oct. 13, although the deadline to register to vote in the Ocean City election only is Oct. 16. The absentee ballot request deadline for the Ocean City election is Nov. 3.
Like almost everything else, voting in November’s municipal election in Ocean City will be a little different this year. Gone will be the traditional booths with voters going behind the curtain and pulling the levers for their favored candidates.
Instead, the town’s Board of Supervisors of Elections are anticipating a large majority of voters to cast their ballots by mail through the absentee ballot process because of the lingering COVID-19 concerns. For those who choose to vote in person, the election will still be held in Hall A of the Roland E. Powell Convention Center on Nov. 3, but there will be changes in the election process.
Absentee ballots are traditionally generated at the town level and ballots are mailed and returned to the City Clerk’s office. This year, however, the board is expecting a large number of absentee ballots that could make it difficult for the board members to tally and announce the results on Nov. 3. The absentee ballots request and application process is spelled out on a link on the town’s government website.
The process on election day itself in Ocean City will be different in other ways this year because of COVID. For example, the traditional voting booths will be replaced with paper ballots filled out at tables in the convention center and fed into scanning machines.
The change is largely in the interest of public safety. Voters will be able to distance socially and each will be provided with his or her own pen, for example. Masks will be required and eliminating the old voting booths will limit interaction and prevent board members and staff from cleaning and disinfecting the booths after every use.
