As the count got underway in a windowless office in Glen Burnie, Diesha Contee quietly watched from the back.
It was Sept. 25, days after election supervisors acknowledged accidentally switching results in the Ward 6 Democratic primary for Annapolis City Council, awarding Contee’s tally to her opponent.
The audit, with two-person teams checking each ballot by hand, ended with 185 votes for Contee and 124 for Craig Cussimanio.
That was too late for Contee’s signs. Someone started taking them down immediately after the faulty results showed her losing.
“I had kind of just started transitioning back to what I’m already doing,” Contee said. “Whether I won or whether I lost, I knew I was going to have some adjustments.”
Now those adjustments are the sort that come after a victory.
She won in November, taking 72% of the vote against a Republican candidate in a deep blue city, and was sworn in Monday with the seven other City Council members and the new mayor, Jared Littmann.
But what if the Anne Arundel County Board of Election Supervisors hadn’t caught the error? Or told Contee the next day?
A grassroots campaign, with just $2,700 to spend on the primary, might never have known the results were loaded in reverse onto an official spreadsheet — and might never have challenged them.
“So they did apologize,” Contee said. “They called me on the phone and told me, and then when they saw me, because I actually went when they did a recount, they apologized to me there.”
The city, which contracts election services to the county, also issued a public apology to Contee and Cussimanio the day before the audit.
But high tensions over the mistake contributed to more confusion as ballots were being tallied.
“They said their culture was different from ours as regards to an apology,” said Toni Strong Pratt, an adviser to Contee.
Ours vs. theirs, she understood the comment, as in Black and white.
“I was really taken aback.”
Board Chair Eileen Leahy said she didn’t understand what Strong Pratt was asking or what her role was in the campaign.
She apologized again during a Board of Elections meeting that day.
“I was trying to be sensitive and get a better understanding,” she said.
Monday morning, five hours before she was sworn in as Ward 6 alderwoman, Contee and I met for coffee at Leeward Market. It’s a regular hangout several blocks from the apartment she shares with her son, Jamir.
That’s another adjustment she needs to make. Moving.
Contee grew up in Annapolis public housing, graduated from Annapolis High and got a degree, a job as a nursing assistant and an apartment in Glen Burnie. She moved back to Annapolis and into the Harbor House complex so her grandmother, Alice McGhee, could help care for her son.
That experience, growing up in the poorest neighborhoods of Annapolis and then returning, helps define her.
She’s been raised by a network of women, among them Strong Pratt, former Alderwoman Rhonda Pindell Charles, state Sen. Shaneka Henson and her mother, Terry Henson.
When she came home, Contee created a group to revive and expand that network, Rebuilding/Recreating Our Maternal Village. It started as social and emotional support, and when the pandemic threw everything into turmoil, it was about feeding people.
She’ll use those experiences on her first objective, getting volunteers to provide activities and food for children at the two public housing recreation centers in her ward.
“I’m asking for somebody to be there for the homework part, somebody to come and do the recreation part, and then at the end they eat,” she said.
“We don’t know how the kids are eating, and you can’t assume whatever’s going on in their home.”
Contee ticked off her broader priorities.
Public safety. She wants better relations between individual police officers and residents in Eastport Terrace and Harbor House in Eastport, and in Robinwood on Tyler Avenue. She’s going to work on intersections where drivers run stop signs.
Environmental justice. Mold is widespread in apartments and townhouses operated by the Annapolis housing authority. Contee sees it as a maintenance issue but a problem exacerbated by residents. She wants the city involved in resolving it.
Affordable housing. She’s talking with other council members. In October, the city adopted new zoning rules for Tyler Avenue — the boundary between Ward 6 and Ward 5 — to encourage mixed housing in place of single-family homes.
Now she just has to find a place to live.
Her $32,000 annual salary as an alderwoman means she no longer qualifies for means-tested Harbor House. She’s looking for a place in the ward where she, her son and her grandmother can live comfortably.
“She’ll be 80 in January,” Contee said. “She has, like, a couple of health issues, so I want to be able to have her live with me.”
Her family was at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium on Monday afternoon to watch her get sworn in before hundreds gathered under a tent.
Her community family was there too, bringing hugs and kisses.
One of them was Henson, the state senator who previously served as the alderwoman for Ward 6. She held the Bible as Contee took her oath to protect Annapolis.
She has lots to learn. She doesn’t know much about flooding at City Dock or downtown parking, issues in one ward that take up a disproportionate amount of time in a city with eight wards.
Contee doesn’t have an opinion on lawsuits over the city’s role in unsafe public housing conditions, although she helped gather community input on the plan to redevelop some of them.
“They could have just did it without getting input,” she said. “And they really did get input. So I love that.”
But, as she heads into her first council meeting Monday, Contee knows she wants to stay true to the place where she lives and the community that raised her.
The title of alderwoman won’t change that.
“Actually, I’ve been telling everybody that’s asking, like, ‘Well, how do we address you?’
“I said, Diesha. I’m just Diesha.”
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