A printing mistake affecting 400,000 voters lands on top of unresolved voter roll problems — and the state’s safeguards rely on trust more than verification
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland’s State Board of Elections is asking voters to trust that its systems will catch potential duplicate ballots — but that assurance is arriving on a foundation that’s been under legal challenge for months.
The Maryland State Board of Elections acknowledged last week that a vendor error caused an unknown number of voters to receive the wrong party’s ballot for the June 23 gubernatorial primary. Because the state cannot determine which specific voters were affected, it is sending replacement ballots to everyone who was mailed a ballot before May 14. That means roughly 400,000 households are now holding — or have already mailed back — original ballots, with replacement packets on the way.
The SBE’s answer to the obvious question — what happens if someone returns both? — is that only one will be counted.
Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, responding to an identical vendor error situation in 2024, issued guidance stating that if a voter already returned both ballots, only one will be accepted and counted, and that “procedures are in place to assure that one and only one ballot gets counted for each voter.”
That guidance almost certainly governs this situation, too. But what those procedures actually consist of matters — because the mechanism is less airtight than the confidence behind it suggests.
According to the SBE’s own published documentation, there is no tracking number on the ballot itself — only on the ballot packet. The barcode on the ballot is used to match ballot style to voter, not to identify or track individual returns. That means catching a duplicate return depends on human canvassers cross-referencing voter records during the canvassing process — not on any electronic ballot-level flag.
Under Maryland’s canvassing rules, local boards begin processing mail-in ballots eight days before early voting starts, with additional sessions continuing through July 6. Canvassers working through hundreds of thousands of ballot returns under that timeline are the primary safeguard against a voter’s original and replacement ballots both being counted.
The state may well catch every duplicate. But “we have procedures” is a different statement than “here is how those procedures work and how errors are audited.” The SBE has not publicly explained the specific error-catch rate, audit mechanism, or what happens to original ballots that were returned before the replacement arrived.
The Voter Roll Problem Underneath
The ballot error doesn’t land in a vacuum. It lands on top of a documented and actively litigated dispute over the accuracy of Maryland’s voter registration rolls — one that directly affects how many ballots are floating to addresses that shouldn’t be receiving them.
A 2023 audit by the Office of Legislative Audits of the Maryland General Assembly found the State Board of Elections’ review of voter registration data “remained inadequate,” identifying 2,426 potentially deceased individuals with active registrations and 327 potential duplicate registrations.
In December 2025, the Republican National Committee and the Maryland GOP filed suit against the SBE and Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis, alleging the state has failed to adequately remove deceased voters and those who have moved out of state from its rolls. The GOP’s complaint alleged that data shows more registered voters than adults eligible to vote in Maryland — something state officials called “obviously impossible” and attributed to methodology differences — and cited counties with registration rates the suit called “implausibly high.”
Separately, the U.S. Department of Justice filed its own lawsuit against DeMarinis in December 2025, seeking the state’s complete unredacted voter registration list as part of a nationwide investigation into alleged non-compliance with federal voter list-maintenance requirements. DeMarinis filed a motion to dismiss in January 2026.
The practical effect of inflated voter rolls on a mass mail-in reissuance is straightforward: ballots going to outdated addresses create a pool of unreturned originals that no system is tracking. If a replacement arrives at a current address while an original sits in a former resident’s mailbox, the state has no mechanism to account for it.
What Should Be Asked
The SBE has been responsive in public communications — DeMarinis said the agency is “actively answering phones and responding to emails” — but responsiveness is not the same as transparency about process. Several questions remain unanswered publicly:
How many duplicate returns were caught and rejected during the comparable 2024 Montgomery County incident? That’s an existing data point the state holds. What is the specific canvassing protocol for flagging a second ballot envelope from the same voter? Is that process audited, and by whom? What is the status of unreturned original ballots in the state’s tracking system — are they flagged as outstanding when a replacement is received and returned?
These are not accusations of fraud. They are the basic accountability questions any election administrator should be able to answer before a primary involving hundreds of thousands of replacement ballots.
Maryland voters are being asked to trust that a manual process, operating under time pressure and high volume, will catch every duplicate across a reissuance that exists only because the state’s vendor made an error that the state itself could not audit after the fact.
That’s a lot of trust to extend to a system that a 2023 legislative audit found inadequate — and that two separate federal lawsuits say still isn’t fixed.
Sources: Reporting draws on statements from the Maryland State Board of Elections and Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis; a Montgomery County Board of Elections public statement on duplicate mail-in ballot procedures from 2024; the SBE’s published canvassing rules and Rumor Control documentation at elections.maryland.gov; a 2023 audit by the Office of Legislative Audits of the Maryland General Assembly; the December 2025 RNC and Maryland GOP lawsuit against DeMarinis and the State Board of Elections; a separate December 2025 U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against DeMarinis seeking the state’s voter registration list; and news coverage from The Baltimore Banner, WTOP, WMAR, Fox Baltimore, and the Baltimore Sun.
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