Maryland will reissue roughly 400,000 mail ballots after voters reported receiving ballots for the wrong party, a problem that hit as the state began sending out primary ballots this week ahead of the June 23 gubernatorial primary.
State Board of Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis said Friday that the majority of voters received the correct ballot, but the state cannot determine which voters were sent the wrong version, so it is replacing the entire batch. He said he had requested and ordered replacement ballots for everyone affected.
“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. “We want to be proactive and address the situation head-on and will provide more instructions to those affected as soon as possible.”
The affected voters are those who were mailed a ballot before May 14. Voters who asked for a ballot to be delivered by email are not affected. The state said it will notify impacted voters by social media and U.S. mail, and it has until June 16 to handle new mail-ballot requests before the primary.
DeMarinis said Taylor Corporation, the Minnesota-based vendor that prepared the ballots, made the error and will reissue them at no additional cost to the state. He also said Maryland will rely on long-standing practices and multiple safeguards to make sure no one votes twice. Those safeguards include codes printed on each ballot to identify which voter it was assigned to and whether it was cast and counted.
“We have multiple safeguards in place to protect against someone voting twice,” he said.
The mistake lands in a state where mail voting has grown sharply. It surged in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and remained popular in the 2022 gubernatorial primary, when nearly 350,000 voters cast ballots by mail, about one-third of all votes cast. The method has also drawn criticism without evidence from President Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers, even as it has become a routine part of elections in Maryland.
The question now is not whether the state will keep the June 23 primary on track — it will — but whether it can correct a large ballot mailing error fast enough to keep voters confident before ballots start coming back in volume. That is the standard Maryland has set for itself, and the state says it is moving to meet it.
Separately, Maryland has seen other recent lottery and prize news, including a report that a Maryland bus driver claimed a $5 million scratch-off prize.
