Julie Brown, a Charles County school board candidate who was tied to multiple shoplifting arrests in recent years, appears to have lost her race.
The board has two seats available per district and one at-large seat. In results that were missing only mail-in and provisional ballots, Brown was in third place in District 2. She trailed the second-place candidate by almost 1,000 votes, 6 percentage points behind her nearest rival.
Jamila Smith and Brenda L. Thomas, both endorsed by the Maryland State Education Association, were the top vote-getters in the district as of Wednesday evening.
In total, Smith and Thomas got over half the votes counted so far in the District 2 school board election.
Brown, who had the most votes in the July primary, ran on a platform emphasizing more discipline for students. She was also an advocate for parental input on the school curriculum and more parental involvement in children’s lives.
The Local News Network at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and Capital News Service reported last week that Brown, 57, was running under her maiden name. Court and police records show that she has several arrests under the names Julie Lee Higgs and Julie Lee Melton Higgs.
People with those names, who share Brown’s address and birthdate, have been charged with shoplifting five times in five years in Charles County. In addition, Higgs was charged with driving on a suspended license and accused by a police officer of using her mother’s name, Patricia Lee Brown, in an attempt to avoid prosecution in 2016.