Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik raised so much campaign cash that she ran out of time to spend it during her unsuccessful bid to unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Baltimore.
Now, Klacik has a use for some of the leftover money — addressing her unspecified concerns about mail-in ballots in the 7th Congressional District race.
“Luckily, we raised enough money to investigate,” she tweeted Sunday.
Her tweet included incorrect claims about returns in the race.
“I beat my opponent on day of & in-person early voting, along with absentee. However, 97k mail in ballots were found in his favor?” she wrote.
But it offered no other details and Klacik did not respond Monday to phone messages and a text.
Mfume has captured 72% of the vote to 28% for Klacik in the district, which includes parts of Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Howard County. The local boards of elections continue to count mail-in ballots received or postmarked by the Nov. 3 deadline, but they are not expected to change the outcome.
Asked about Klacik’s tweet, Nikki Charlson, the state’s deputy elections administrator, said in a statement Monday: “The Maryland State Board of Elections has seen no credible evidence of voter fraud at any point during the election process.”
According to the State Board of Elections website, Klacik got fewer votes than Mfume in all three categories she said she won: in-person Election Day voting, in-person voting during Maryland’s eight-day early voting period, and ballots cast by mail, previously called absentee ballots.
“Kim Klacik and her friend Donald Trump continue to sound like sore losers," Mfume said in a statement Monday to The Baltimore Sun. "The voters have spoken. In both elections this year, the people of the 7th Congressional District have overwhelmingly rejected her and her message. It’s time to move on.”
Klacik also lost to Mfume in April in a special election to fill the remainder of the term of the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings. Mfume’s victory this fall gives him a full, two-year term that begins in January.
Klacik’s tweet Sunday to her nearly 500,000 followers came in response to a tweet by Trump, the Republican president who had endorsed her.
“We believe these people are thieves. The big city machines are corrupt,” Trump tweeted the day after major networks called the presidential contest for Democrat Joe Biden.
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“Agreed,” Klacik replied in her tweet.
Trump, who has refused to concede, has alleged voting irregularities and has set up an election fraud hotline. His campaign has filed a number of election-related lawsuits in battleground states.
Klacik is losing by a nearly 5-to-1 margin in mail-in voting, with the margin most pronounced in Baltimore City. Mfume has received 125,137 mail-in votes and Klacik 25,765 so far. She came closest to Mfume in the returns from in-person voting on Election Day: 21,553 people voted for Mfume to 17,506 for Klacik.
After capturing Trump’s attention last year with videos of litter in Baltimore, Klacik scored another viral success during the campaign with a video showing scenes of West Baltimore and her urging Black people to vote for a Republican.
She raised more than $7 million during the campaign, largely on the strength of that video and an appearance at the Republican National Convention, and had $2.5 million left as of Oct. 14, according to her Federal Election Commission report.
Klacik is a conservative commentator and member of the Baltimore County Central Republican Committee. She does not live in the 7th District, but promised to move there if elected.
Baltimore Sun reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this article.