Meadows declares victory in HD74 despite no official vote totals

Charlotte Meadows declared victory in the Alabama House District 74 race Tuesday night. 

Her challenger, attorney Michael Fritz, conceded defeat. 

Not a single vote had been officially counted when they did so, and the race wasn’t exactly a blowout. 

Fritz’s campaign staff said it concluded from going to each precinct that Fritz received somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 percent of the vote. That was enough information to prompt him to concede. 

But by well after 10 p.m. Tuesday — more than three hours after polls closed in the race and long after the final results in Montgomery’s mayoral and city council races had been reported — the Alabama Secretary of State’s office said it hadn’t yet received a single report from the Montgomery Election Center. Shortly after 10, that office said it had dispatched a staff member to the Election Center to monitor the situation. 

But Meadows, Fritz and the Alabama Republican Party weren’t going to wait. All three released statements calling Meadows the winner. 

“We did it!” a social media post from Meadows read. It went on to thank her staff, friends and family. 

Fritz congratulated Meadows on a clean race and thanked his staff for running a respectable campaign despite being heavily out-spent.