MARYLAND (WBFF) — Fallout continues tonight over Maryland’s mail-in ballot printing error.
While the State Board of Elections says replacement ballots have been sent and safeguards are in place, questions remain over how the mistake happened and whether enough is being done to maintain voter confidence.
From the beginning, Kate Sullivan, Director of the election watchdog group Secure the Vote MD, says she had concerns with how the situation would be handled.
“I braced myself because our experience with the State Board of Election is that they rarely take responsibility for errors and they always offer the wrong solution,” she said.
She now says those fears have been realized, as more than 500,000 replacement ballots make their way to voters’ mailboxes.
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“To assume that we can manage this administrative nightmare and guarantee that every vote counts is disingenuous at best.
Regardless of whether voters received the correct ballot or not, Maryland’s Election Administrator, Jared DeMarinis, is advising everyone to throw away their original ballot and vote with the replacement.
According to the state’s website, those replacement ballots include an accompanying letter and are labeled as “replacement ballots” on the envelope.
The State Board of Elections also says safeguards are in place to prevent duplicate voting and has stated that incorrect ballots will be voided.
“Some Democrats got Republican ballots, Republicans got Democrat ballots and since my Maryland vendor could not accurately identify who received what ballot, the only course of action to ensure integrity and security of mail-in voting was to send all the voters who had requested a mail-in ballot a replacement ballot,” DeMarinis said in a recent national media interview.
However, Sullivan is among those questioning whether every voter will actually receive, or understand, those instructions.
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“that’s my biggest concern, that people won’t know what’s going on,” she said, “They won’t know to discard, or they won’t know to revote. So, that is a big issue that nobody can solve, unless you just pause mail in ballots.”
Wednesday, FOX45 sent additional questions to the State Board of Elections, including whether officials can guarantee no votes will be lost because of the mistake and whether temporarily limiting broader mail-in voting was considered.
As of publication, FOX45 had not received a response.
Meanwhile, those concerns are also being echoed by several republican lawmakers and by President Donald Trump, who has publicly called for a federal investigation into the issue.
“I have asked that Jared DeMarinis give a full account of start to finish, how this happened,” Sullivan said, “This idea that it was the printer’s fault. It doesn’t make sense that, you know, the State Board of Elections has this process all the way through. If it works properly, they get the final review.”
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