When Republican Del. Ryan Nawrocki told Fox45 two weeks ago that Maryland “will not comply” with the Trump administration’s new election security order, neither his office nor Democratic Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office would say what that actually meant in practice.
Now there’s an answer. Rather than adopt DHS’s security measures — or explain why it wouldn’t — Maryland’s Democratic leadership chose to sue.
Given a checklist, the state’s answer was litigation, not a plan of its own.
The Lawsuit
On July 23, AG Brown filed suit against DHS and FEMA, joined by attorneys general from 20 other states and D.C. — all but two of them Democratic-led — plus the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, challenging new conditions attached to this year’s Homeland Security Grant Program funding. The conditions, laid out in a July 9 notice of funding opportunity, require states to:
Devote at least 3% of their Homeland Security Program and Urban Area Security Initiative awards to election-security investments
Submit a plan to phase out electronic voting systems that use barcodes or QR codes in favor of hand-marked paper ballots
Comply with a post-election 5% manual audit under guidelines the DHS secretary has yet to set
FEMA says it will withhold 20% of each state’s grant award until compliance is verified, and has warned that continued noncompliance could mean suspension or full termination of the funding.
It’s worth sitting with what Maryland is actually objecting to here. A transition to hand-marked paper ballots and a 5% post-election manual audit are not fringe positions — they’re measures election-security advocates across the political spectrum, including plenty of Democrats, have called for after years of concern about electronic voting system opacity. Maryland isn’t arguing those measures are bad policy. It’s arguing DHS lacks the authority to condition grant funding on them. That’s a real legal question, but it’s also worth naming plainly: the state had the option to adopt stronger paper-trail and audit standards on its own terms, and instead its chosen response was a 21-state lawsuit contesting federal authority. Nawrocki’s “won’t comply” line and Brown’s lawsuit aren’t in tension, whatever the party lines suggest — they’re describing the same outcome from two directions.dy getting lost: Nawrocki, a Republican, is the one saying Maryland “won’t comply”; Brown, a Democrat, is the one actually taking action — and the action is a lawsuit against the federal government, not a move toward the administration’s checklist.
What This Doesn’t Touch — Yet
To be precise about what’s alleged and what isn’t: Maryland’s inclusion in DHS’s recent statements is tied to an 18-state data-compromise claim, not the separate noncitizen-voter-roll claim DHS has directed at California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada.
But absence of an allegation isn’t the same as a clean bill of health. Unlike the 23 states that cooperated with DHS’s SAVE citizenship-verification program — where DHS says it found roughly 23,000 noncitizens and 400,000 deceased individuals still on the rolls — Maryland has not run that check. No state audit of Maryland’s voter rolls against SAVE or similar citizenship data has been conducted or made public. The state’s position, through DeMarinis and Brown, has been to defend its processes as secure, not to produce a citizenship-verification result. Those are different claims, and Maryland has so far offered the former while the latter remains untested.
The Cheverly Fight — And What’s Missing From It
That gap between “we say our systems are sound” and “we’ve actually checked” shows up again, in miniature, in Prince George’s County.
Two weeks ago, the American Center for Law and Justice sued the town of Cheverly on behalf of the American Accountability Foundation, demanding records tied to Cheverly’s noncitizen voter registry. AAF says it filed a Maryland Public Information Act request on October 17, 2025, simply asking for records of who’s on the registry — and says the town never meaningfully responded, despite repeated follow-ups, for nine months.
Nine months of silence on a routine records request is not a technicality. It’s the story.
Some context is worth adding, in fairness: Cheverly’s underlying policy wasn’t adopted in secret. Charter Amendment Resolution CAR-2-22, which allows noncitizen voting in town elections, passed 5-1 (one abstention) at a public hearing on July 28, 2022, with named council members — Jenny Garcia, Micah Watson, Nicole Bryner, Mayor Kayce Munyeneh, and Amy Fry voting yes. CASA publicized the vote at the time. So the ACLJ’s “what is Cheverly hiding?” framing overstates the case on the policy itself — that part was always public.
But that context doesn’t get the town off the hook for the actual complaint, which isn’t about the policy — it’s about records. A Maryland town ignoring a legal public-information request for nine months, on a subject this politically charged, is exactly the kind of institutional non-responsiveness that invites suspicion, warranted or not. Silence is a choice, and in this case it’s the town’s, not the requester’s.
As of this writing, no one from the Cheverly town government — the mayor, the town clerk, or any council member — has gone on record addressing the lawsuit or the original records request.
The Bigger Context
Maryland municipalities allowing noncitizen voting in local elections aren’t a new phenomenon—they span more than a century.
Cheverly isn’t unique, and the practice itself isn’t new — Maryland municipalities allowing noncitizen voting in local-only elections go back over a century. But the pace is worth noting on its own terms, because it cuts against the idea that this is settled, static policy nobody needs to keep an eye on:
Barnesville — 1918
Somerset — 1976
Takoma Park — 1991 referendum; first noncitizen votes cast 1993
Chevy Chase Section 3, Garrett Park, Glen Echo, Martin’s Additions — various dates, Montgomery County
Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, Riverdale Park — Prince George’s County, mid-2010s
Cheverly — 2022
College Park — passed 2017 (after an initial vote was ruled invalid on a technicality), in effect since 2019
Edmonston — November 2024
Brentwood — requires one year of residency
Greenbelt — September 2024, 6-0 council vote
Frederick — September 2024, 4-1 vote; the largest municipality in the state to adopt the policy, with roughly 6,400 noncitizens estimated eligible for the first time in the November 2025 election
That’s at least 15 municipalities. Three of them — Edmonston, Greenbelt, and Frederick — passed their versions within a single two-month stretch in the fall of 2024. Whatever one thinks of the policy itself, “this has been quietly normal for decades” and “this expanded to three more towns, including the state’s largest municipality to do it, in the last two years” are both true — and the second part is the one getting less attention.
Maryland has defended its processes. It has not produced a citizenship-verification result.
What’s Still Open
Whether Cheverly responds to the lawsuit, and what its actual registry numbers show
Whether Maryland will run any citizenship cross-check on its voter rolls, comparable to what 23 cooperating states have already done under SAVE, or continue to decline
Whether Frederick’s fall 2025 election produced any public accounting of noncitizen turnout — none appears to exist yet
Whether DHS’s CISA plan, promised within 30 days of Secretary Mullin’s mid-July remarks, actually materializes and what it says about Maryland specifically
Whether AG Brown’s lawsuit succeeds, given a federal judge already ruled against DOJ’s separate attempt to compel Maryland’s full voter file, on privacy grounds, in June — a result Maryland officials are likely to lean on
MDBayNews will follow up as these develop.
Sources: AG Brown v. DHS/FEMA complaint (filed July 23, 2026); DHS Homeland Security Grant Program notice of funding opportunity (July 9, 2026); Fox45/WBFF interview with Del. Ryan Nawrocki (July 17, 2026); DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin press remarks on SAVE program results (July 2026); ACLJ press statement, “What Are They Trying to Hide?” (July 10, 2026); CASA press release on Cheverly Charter Amendment CAR-2-22 (2022); Cheverly, MD public meeting agenda/minutes archive; Ballotpedia, “Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States”; City of Frederick 2025 election records; prior MDBayNews reporting, “Maryland Named Twice by DHS” (July 19, 2026).
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