‘Corruption’ or ‘Incompetence’? Maryland Rushes to Reprint, Resend 500,000 Mail Ballots

Scrambling to repair its mail-ballot boondoggle, the Maryland State Board of Elections began reprinting ballots Thursday, with plans to have more than 500,000 ballots resent to voters by next Friday.

The elections board first announced last week that an undetermined number of mail ballots for the June 23 party primary were sent to the wrong voters, which it blamed on an error. While an undetermined number of voters will be voting a second ballot, the state’s top election official assured the public that only one ballot will be counted per voter for Maryland’s June party primary.

“The primary question that we have received from voters is ‘what do I do if I already returned my mail-in ballot.’ The answer is simply to vote the replacement ballot,” Jared DeMarinis, administrator for the Maryland State Board of Elections, said in a memo this week sent to voters across the state.

The memo went on to say the Maryland State Board of Elections has “safeguards that ensure only one ballot per voter is counted.”

The mishap of sending the wrong ballots to voters drew criticism from President Donald Trump, members of Congress, and other national election observers.

On Monday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the Justice Department should investigate Maryland. On Thursday, he referred to “Maryland voting, which is so crooked.”

“In Maryland, as you probably saw, they had 500,000 mail-in votes that were corrupt. They were corrupt. They said the printer made a mistake. Don’t believe that. And they got caught with 500,000 mail-in ballots that were corrupt. We’ve got to stop it. We have more corrupt elections than third world countries have.”

On Monday, Trump said, “I’ve asked law enforcement to look at it very strenuously.”

“They have 500,000 new ballots going. So what happens to the original? Are they going to come in? And are they going to come in and infect our system? So it’s a very, very serious thing that’s happened.”

The matter was likely incompetence and not corruption, said J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election-integrity legal group.

“Not every screw up is nefarious,” Adams told the Daily Signal. “Maryland is notorious for incompetent election administration.”

Adams noted this was a very expensive mistake for the state, but he said it demonstrates bigger problems with reliance on mail-in ballots.

“When you leave elections in the hands of mail-in ballots, you are inviting failure, because 100,000 people don’t get the wrong ballot when they go to the polls,” Adams said.

Maryland is a closed-primary state, meaning Democrats and Republicans can vote only in their respective party primaries. But the error led to voters receiving ballots for contests they were not eligible to vote in.

The state blamed the error on the vendor, Taylor Print & Visual Impressions, a Minnesota-based printing corporation.

“Because the vendor could not isolate which voters received incorrect ballots, SBE is notifying every voter who requested a mail-in ballot,” the DeMarinis memo says.

A Taylor spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry from the Daily Signal for this story by publication time.

The state has notified more than 500,000 affected voters by postcards, emails, and text messages. Ballots must be returned by 8 p.m. EDT on Election Day, June 23, 2026.

His memo went on to explain how the state will prevent ballots from being double-counted.

“Every mail-in ballot issued is tracked in Maryland’s secure statewide voter registration system with a unique code/identifier,” DeMarinis said. He continued, “If a voter requested a mail-in ballot and has a replacement ballot issued, the original mail-in ballot tracking information is noted in the statewide voter registration system so it cannot be received for canvassing. This ensures each voter can return only one ballot.”