Mail ballots received by the Montgomery County Board of Elections during the 2022 primary are sorted during a ballot canvass. (File photo courtesy Montgomery County Board of Elections)
Maryland election officials responded to a Justice Department request for the state’s voter rolls and procedures for maintaining them with a detailed description of election laws and directions on how federal officials could look up the publicly available information for themselves.
The six-page letter from the Maryland State Board of Elections, dated July 30, was in response to a July 14 letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division asking for evidence that the state is “complying with the statewide voter registration list maintenance provisions of the National Voter Registration Act.”
The letter to Maryland was just one of a number of letters that Justice has sent to states probing the integrity of voter rolls. So far, those letters have mostly targeted Democrat-led states, but federal officials told the National Association of Secretaries of State that they expect to eventually reach all 50 states and the District of Columbia with their requests.
Maryland Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis responded with a detailed description of state and federal laws that dictate how state and county election officials maintain voter rolls and remove anyone who is ineligible to vote.
That includes getting “records of deaths, convictions and name changes from state and Federal agencies,” sharing that information with county election officials, contacting any voters on those lists and canceling a voter’s registration “when statutorily-required conditions are met.” The letter went on to note that state law includes safeguards against prematurely removing a voter from the rolls.
“Improper cancellation leads to disenfranchisement of an eligible voter. That is why it is a detailed process. It must be certain,” DeMarinis said in the letter. “Maryland’s process errs on the side of removing any doubt in the cancellation before potentially disenfranchising a voter.”
But the Justice Department letter raised questions about the state’s efforts to purge duplicate and ineligible voters — including those who are dead, convicted or undocumented.
The feds’ letter requested voter registration data from November 2022 to November 2024. It also also asked the state to provide “the number of voters identified as ineligible to vote” during that period as a “non-citizen, … adjudicated incompetent” or because they had a felony conviction. Federal attorneys set a 14-day deadline for state officials to provide the information.
DeMarinis said the state was reviewing mailing records cited in the Justice Department letter, but would not be able to meet the two-week deadline to respond. In response to the Justice Department’s request for the state’s current voter registration list, however, DeMarinis said federal officials could download that data on their own, pointing them to the state page on purchasing voter data and the directions to do so.
The state also downplayed the findings of an October 2023 audit of voter roll maintenance by the Office of Legislative Audits, which cited the possibility of double registrations or possibly deceased residents who remained on state voter rolls. State elections officials at the time said auditors exaggerated those claims, and DeMarinis last week pointed to his office’s response to the audit then. That response spelled out the state’s rigorous process of cross-checking registrations that, in the case of duplicate registrations, found “at most a potential 0.00645% rate of duplicates among all active Maryland voter registration records.”
The Justice Department letter was one of two the state received last month, demanding information on voter registration and on state and county election officials efforts to keep the rolls up to date and free of unqualified voters. The second letter, received four days after the Justice Department request, came from lawyers representing a group of local, state and national Republicans who alleged “implausibly high” levels of voter registration, both statewide and in some individual counties.
The GOP letter, directed to the state board and boards of election in Howard and Montgomery counties, threatened to “bring a lawsuit” against the state and local boards “if you fail to take specific actions to correct these violations” within 90 days.
State and local officials said last month that they were still reviewing that letter. But DeMarinis last week, in his letter to the Justice Department, expressed confidence that the system of keeping accurate voter rolls, while protecting the “sacred right” to vote, is sound.
“The State Board works diligently to ensure that every eligible Marylander can register to vote in accordance with federal and state laws,” he wrote. “And as referenced above, election officials in Maryland continue that diligent work to maintain up to date voter rolls.”
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