By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland is one of 18 states named in a declassified federal intelligence review alleging foreign access to voter registration data — and over the past three days, it’s gone from a name on a list to a state DHS is directly calling out, with federal election funding and potential criminal liability for state officials now on the table.
Over the past three days, Maryland has gone from a name on a list to a state DHS is directly calling out.
What the document says
The White House Government Transparency Task Force, created by President Trump in May 2026, released its first batch of declassified intelligence on July 16. The cover memo, dated July 13, states that voter registration rolls from at least 18 states — not all identified by name — were compromised by the People’s Republic of China. Separately, the memo cites more than 200 million voter records compromised without state-specific attribution.
Maryland is one of the states named directly. The full named list: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
It’s worth being precise about what the document does and doesn’t establish. The 200-million-record figure is not tied to the named states — it’s presented as a separate, broader finding. And the release includes a more specific, dated account for a different set of states: voter data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island was downloaded from commercial websites by a suspected Chinese cyber actor in January 2022, with an unsuccessful attempt on Ohio’s voter-registration application. Maryland is not part of that specific, dated incident. What the document does say is that an 18-state memo describes Chinese analysts obtaining and working with registration data from named states, including Maryland, for profiling purposes — a real but less granular claim than the headline number suggests.
Maryland is not part of that specific, dated incident.
This is also a separate list from a second DHS claim in circulation this week — that roughly 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote — which is tied to California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, not Maryland. The two claims have been getting blurred online; they come from different parts of the federal review.
Maryland’s response, so far
Reaction from Maryland officials has been split along both party and role lines.
Gov. Wes Moore, in a post on X the night of the announcement, dismissed the disclosure in political terms, calling it an attempt “to revive a debunked conspiracy theory” and arguing the administration should instead focus on costs and the war. He did not address the underlying data claim.
Those are two different claims, and so far no Maryland official has addressed the data-access question head-on.
Jared DeMarinis, Maryland’s State Administrator of Elections — the official most directly positioned to know — gave a narrower, more technical response: mail-in voting is legal, the state’s registration processes follow federal and state law, cybersecurity is “a top priority & constantly monitored for bad actors,” and paper ballots can’t be hacked. Notably, DeMarinis’s statement defends the integrity of Maryland’s voting process — ballots and verification — rather than directly confirming or denying whether voter registration data was accessed. Those are two different claims, and so far, no Maryland official has addressed the data-access question head-on.
The compliance fight
What ‘will not comply’ means in practice has not yet been specified publicly.
The more concrete development came a day later. Fox45/WBFF Baltimore reported on the night of July 17 that Republican Delegate Ryan Nawrocki, a member of the Maryland Freedom Caucus representing Baltimore County, said the state has indicated it will not comply with a new federal order tied to the review. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown countered that the state’s elections “remain safe, secure, and accurate” — language similar to pushback issued this week by officials in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, all named elsewhere in the federal review.
What “will not comply” means in practice — refusing to share data with DHS, declining to use the federal SAVE verification system, or something else — has not yet been specified publicly by either Nawrocki’s office or the Attorney General’s office.
The stakes for noncompliance are rising. At a DHS press conference this week, Secretary Mullin said CISA would release an updated election infrastructure plan within 30 days, and indicated that states that don’t comply could face funding consequences tied to the FEMA Homeland Security Grant Program. Mullin also said noncompliant states should expect scrutiny over “who voted in their states,” and raised the possibility of criminal penalties, including prison time, for election officials who “disregard information” from DHS.
DHS calls out Maryland by name
Friday, the pressure sharpened. Mullin specifically called on Maryland, by name, to secure its voting machines and scrub its voter rolls — moving Maryland from a name on a list of 18 to a state DHS is directly pressing to act. Mullin said federal election grant funding will now be conditioned on states adopting DHS’s security measures: states that want to be reimbursed for running federal elections will have to implement them.
States that want to be reimbursed for running federal elections will have to implement DHS’s security measures.
Central to that push is the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, which DHS wants states to use to cross-check voter rolls for citizenship. Mullin said that in the 23 states that have already cooperated with the SAVE program, DHS found roughly 23,000 noncitizens and 400,000 dead people still on the rolls. Separately, DHS said it identified about 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states that have not cooperated with the review — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada. Maryland is not among those four; its inclusion remains tied to the separate 18-state data-compromise list, not the noncitizen-registration claim. The two are easy to conflate and shouldn’t be.
The two claims are easy to conflate—and shouldn’t be.
Separately, the Justice Department’s Harmeet Dhillon sent letters to states warning that election officials who “knowingly” retain noncitizens on voter rolls, or who facilitate noncitizen voting, could be held criminally liable — raising the legal stakes for state election administrators, including Maryland’s, beyond the funding fight alone.
No Maryland official has addressed the data-access question head-on.
Pushback on the underlying evidence
The claims driving all of this got a direct, on-air challenge Sunday morning. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” former CISA Director Chris Krebs and election-law expert David Becker disputed the speech’s central framing — that China intended to influence the 2020 election’s outcome — saying the intelligence community’s own 2020 assessments were unambiguous on that point and that the administration’s account misreads them.
Federal election funding and potential criminal liability for state officials are now on the table.
Becker also flagged a practical problem with the tool DHS is now telling states to use: the SAVE program is currently facing active legal challenges over whether DHS can use it this way, and DHS itself acknowledges the underlying data is incomplete. That’s relevant to Maryland specifically, since SAVE compliance is the mechanism now tied to the state’s federal election funding.
What’s still unconfirmed
- No Maryland-specific breach narrative — method, date, or scope — has been published, unlike the six states tied to the 2022 commercial-data-download incident.
- No Maryland official has directly confirmed or denied that voter registration data was accessed.
- The operational meaning of Maryland’s “noncompliance” has not been detailed by either side.
- The 220-million-record figure cited publicly does not trace cleanly to a single document number, though the underlying claim of data exposure is documented.
Neither side has publicly detailed what Maryland’s noncompliance would actually mean.
Neither Attorney General Brown’s office nor Delegate Nawrocki’s office has publicly detailed what Maryland’s noncompliance would mean in practice. MDBayNews will update this story if that changes.
Sources: White House Government Transparency Task Force memo (July 13, 2026); Gov. Wes Moore, @iamwesmoore (July 16); Jared DeMarinis, @JaredDeMarinis (July 16); Fox45/WBFF Baltimore (July 17); DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin press remarks (July 17); Justice Department correspondence via Harmeet Dhillon (reported July 17-18); CBS News, “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” transcript with Chris Krebs and David Becker (July 19).
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