Maryland orders 400,000 ballot replacements after party error

maryland will reissue roughly 400,000 mail ballots after voters reported receiving ballots for the wrong party. State Board of Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis ordered replacement ballots sent to affected voters on Friday, and the board said ballots mailed before May 14 are the ones affected.

DeMarinis said the state started sending mail ballots this week ahead of the June 23 gubernatorial primary. He said most voters received the correct party ballot, but the state cannot determine which voters got the wrong one, so it is replacing the entire batch.

Jared DeMarinis orders replacements

“In order to maintain the security and integrity of mail-in voting, I’ve requested and ordered the sending of replacement ballots to all of those voters that were affected by this error,” DeMarinis said in an interview Friday. He said Taylor Corporation made the error and will reissue ballots at no additional cost to the state.

DeMarinis also said, “We have multiple safeguards in place to protect against someone voting twice.” Those safeguards include codes on the ballots that identify which voter the ballot was assigned to and whether it was cast and counted. The State Board of Elections said it will use long-standing practices to ensure voters only vote once.

Maryland ballot notices

The board said it will use social media and U.S. mail to notify affected voters. Voters who requested their ballot by email are not affected. The state said voters have until June 16 to request a mail ballot.

The error lands in a state where mail voting has already carried substantial weight. Nearly 350,000 voters cast ballots by mail during the 2022 gubernatorial primary, about one-third of all votes cast. DeMarinis said, “We want to be proactive and address the situation head-on and will provide more instructions to those affected as soon as possible.”

For voters who received a ballot before May 14, the practical step is to wait for the replacement and follow the instructions that come with it. Maryland is treating the wrong-party batch as a statewide correction, not an isolated resend, because it cannot match the mis-mailed ballots to specific voters.