By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The replacement ballots are in the mail. The crisis, by Maryland’s official account, is resolved. But a disclosure made quietly at a state board meeting Thursday has raised a question that neither of the previous two chapters of this story had to answer: what exactly happens if a voter ignores the replacement and sends back the original ballot they were told to destroy?
The answer, it turns out, is that it counts.
The Mailing Is Done
The Maryland State Board of Elections completed its replacement ballot mailing on May 27 — two days ahead of the originally stated deadline. Replacement packets, identifiable by envelopes marked “REPLACEMENT BALLOT INSIDE,” began arriving in mailboxes on May 26 and should reach all households by May 31. Voters who requested web-delivered print-at-home ballots were not affected by the error and received no replacement.
The SBE’s instruction to the more than 500,000 affected voters remains: destroy the original, use the replacement, and return it by June 23.
But the Original May Still Count
Here is what changed on Thursday. During a virtual meeting of the Maryland State Board of Elections, Administrator Jared DeMarinis confirmed that if a voter never returns the replacement ballot — and the only ballot the board receives is the original — that ballot will be counted, provided it is for the correct party.
“We want everyone to vote the replacement ballot,” DeMarinis said, “but at the end of the day, if all we receive back is one ballot, we will count that ballot if it’s the correct ballot because that is a part of our standing policies that we’ve had with issuance of a replacement ballot.”
Original ballots, he said, will be quarantined after Election Day and reviewed individually. If it is the only ballot received from that voter, and it is the correct one, officials will determine it should count.
That is a defensible policy on its face — replacement ballots are a routine feature of election administration, and an eligible voter should not lose their vote because they missed a postcard. But it lands differently in this situation. The vendor could not identify which voters received the wrong party ballot. The SBE could not independently verify it. The decision to remail to all 500,000 voters was made precisely because there was no reliable way to know who got the right ballot and who didn’t. Now the same agency is saying: if you send back what you got the first time, and it happens to be the right party, your vote counts.
The board has not explained how it will verify the accuracy of original ballots in volume, or what the error-catch rate looks like at that scale.
Congress Is Watching
The disclosure came the same week Republicans on the U.S. House Administration Committee sent a formal letter to DeMarinis demanding answers about the June 23 primary. The message from one committee member was direct: “If they open up the books and show us everything, then I don’t think there’s any need for him to necessarily come in for a formal hearing with the committee. If they’re stonewalling, then I suspect you’ll see him being called in in front of the committee to answer questions under oath.”
DeMarinis has not held a press conference on the matter. His communications have come through board meetings, email updates, and social media.
The Legal Battlefield Expands
As MDBayNews reported in our May 26 update, the RNC had already filed suit against the SBE over voter roll maintenance before the ballot error occurred, and the DOJ had separately sued DeMarinis seeking access to Maryland’s unredacted voter registration list. This week, the Democratic National Committee formally intervened in the RNC’s lawsuit on the side of the SBE, arguing that the Republican push for aggressive voter roll purges would disproportionately remove eligible voters — particularly students and renters who move frequently.
The legal battle over who belongs on Maryland’s voter rolls is now a three-way fight, playing out in federal court 24 days before a primary in which more than half a million replacement ballots are circulating alongside the originals they were supposed to replace.
Where Things Stand
The replacement mailing is complete. The primary is June 23. The SBE says the safeguards hold.
What is also true: the agency overseeing this election has three federal court reprimands in six years for voter roll violations, an active DOJ lawsuit over roll disclosure, a separate RNC suit over roll maintenance, a vendor that couldn’t identify which ballots it got wrong, and now a confirmed policy under which voters can return the ballot they were told to destroy and have it counted.
Maryland voters should understand what they are being asked to trust — and who is doing the asking.
This is the third in an ongoing series. See MDBayNews’s original May 19 report and the May 26 follow-up for full background on the vendor error, the scope of the replacement mailing, and the political response.
Sources: Maryland State Board of Elections; Maryland Daily Record; WJLA/ABC7; Democracy Docket; U.S. House Administration Committee letter; prior MDBayNews reporting.
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