Election integrity fiasco in Maryland
Maryland election officials are facing a serious test of public trust after a vendor coding error reportedly caused some voters to receive incorrect mail-in ballots during the 2026 gubernatorial primary. The error involved ballots mailed before May 14, 2026.
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Maryland State Board of Elections (SBE) administrator Jared DeMarinis said at the May 28, 2026 state election board meeting that more than 563,000 voters were included in affected mailing but that the “vendor could not accurately identify” which voters had received the wrong ballot. DeMarinis further clarified that there were “over 447,000 voters” whose ballots may have been affected. The board identified the error and attempted to correct it by sending out hundreds of thousands of replacement ballots. President Trump commented on the matter shortly after the issue became public.
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Kate Sullivan, director of the SecuretheVoteMD, a volunteer election integrity organization, believes that the election board likely chose a remedy that was not only unnecessarily chaotic, but legally questionable under Maryland law:
The State Board of Elections had a simple, legal solution sitting right in front of them. They should have complied with Maryland Election Law §11-303.2 — the “first ballot” rule, which requires them to verify the original ballots as they come in, count the correct ones, and cure the incorrect ones while there was still time.
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That is exactly what the law requires. Instead, they flooded the system with replacement ballots, locked the originals in a vault until certification day, and issued guidance that overrides the “first ballot” statute entirely. One has to ask, when an election authority ignores an obvious lawful remedy and chooses a legally questionable path that potentially disenfranchises voters, it is no longer sufficient to call it a mistake. Marylanders deserve a full accounting of why this approach was chosen — and by whom.
Now SecuretheVoteMD is demanding that the Maryland State Board of Elections take five concrete steps before the November 3, 2026 general election to protect voters from disenfranchisement. In sum, the organization is asking election officials to address key questions on the record: how the original erroneous ballots are being identified, what adjudication standard is being applied, how many original-batch ballots were received, how many were rejected, what notification process will be used for affected voters, and how the chain of custody was maintained from receipt through counting.
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SecuretheVoteMD is also adamant that every voter whose ballot is rejected should be affirmatively notified within ten days of primary election certification. The organization contends that if a citizen’s ballot is rejected because of an error generated by the election system, the voter has a right to know.
Sullivan says DeMarinis and the Maryland State Board of Elections have resisted SecuretheVoteMD’s demand that affected voters be directly notified. At the May 28 SBE meeting, DeMarinis appeared to minimize the seriousness of the error, telling board members that the matter would be addressed as part of a post-primary “lessons learned” review, rather than through an independent investigation or additional voter notification beyond what the board had already done or posted on its website.
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According to reporting from Maryland Matters, Nikki Tyree, executive director of the League of Women Voters, agreed with SecuretheVoteMD, stating that the General Assembly should “look into this.”
[Expletive] “lessons learned.” This is so far beyond their lessons learned. This is a situation where we need an independent investigation, whatever that means. The General Assembly needs to be looking into this.
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In addition to demanding that the board notify voters of their rejected ballots, SecuretheVoteMD is demanding that the July 6 “Original Ballot” canvass be conducted live, in public, open to credentialed observers, and streamed online with a clear camera angle on the actual ballot-review process. The group also asks that party representatives, citizen accountability organizations, counsel, local press, and bipartisan local board members be present and visibly engaged.
Upon certification, SecuretheVoteMD is also asking for a full accounting of the canvass results, including “exact” auditable counts of
Additionally, SecuretheVoteMD seeks preservation and production of records concerning the coding error, the decision to reissue ballots, and instructions for ballot handling. The group wants to review emails, texts, internal memos, written directives, vendor specifications, error logs, legal opinions, local board instructions, voter-level ballot tracking data, quarantine counts, and a reconciliation report identifying voters who returned both an original and a replacement ballot.
According to Sullivan, without a court order, SecuretheVoteMD would be required to pay $17,000 to obtain that information. Sullivan said she is worried the board will “sweep it under the rug if no one says or does anything,” and that “the only way we're going to fix this problem is if there’s a full autopsy of how all this broke down and how it happened.” The exact wording of SecuretheVoteMD’s Maryland Public Information Act request (PIA) is pictured below:
Finally, SecuretheVoteMD is seeking a court-ordered, independent third-party audit of Maryland’s election administration process after the 2026 primary, completed in time to implement corrective recommendations before the September 3, 2026, general election ballot-printing deadline.
Image via Pixabay, Pixabay License.