Maryland mail-in-ballots vulnerable to theft
Count me in as one of the millions of Americans who think it’s vitally important to have fair and transparent elections. Imagine my shock when I learned anyone can order my Maryland mail-in ballot by just using my name, address, and date of birth.
How can this be? It should be as hard to take my vote away as it should be to get into my bank account or board a plane in my name, right? Not in Maryland.
Simply look at the Maryland State Board of Elections (SBE) Mail-In Ballot Request form.
Sections 1 and 2: Provide your name, address, and date of birth. These are facts anyone can pull up in a remedial Google search.
Then in Section 5, the SBE allows the individual filling out the form to have the form sent to a different address or faxed to any number. To round out this pitiful one-page document, there is no need to verify who is requesting this form. Maryland does not match
signatures. Maryland does not require identification to vote, much less to request this form. Maryland does require the address to match your voter registration address on file, however, someone could still order my ballot to be sent to a different address or faxed halfway around the world.
But fear not! If you request your ballot by email, then the SBE does require your driver’s license number or the last four digits of your Social Security number. It’s heartening
to know that the state cares about personally identifiable information for only one method of ballot delivery.
Though this process has been lax for years, COVID exacerbated the situation. In 2020, the SBE sent ballots to every registered voter. Simultaneously, the SBE ordered 19 million in-person ballots for our state, which has a population of just over 6 million, and only 4.1 million registered voters. How do approximately 4 million voters need 19 million ballots? In 2020, the SBE said the additional ballots were needed to facilitate voting during the pandemic, when voters were allowed to fill out a ballot at any in-person voting center in their county, according to a report in Maryland Matters. But what happened with those excess ballots?
Also, given that the SBE automatically sends mail-in ballot request forms to the entire list of registered voters, which they have already done again in 2024, they must maintain pristine voter rolls. But this is not the case, as exemplified by one county alone. By unanimous bipartisan vote in 2022, the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections asked SBE to work with them in eliminating thousands of names from the voter rolls, for which the local board had documented receiving rejected mail for five years. This was an effort to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Nearly two years later, SBE has done no further work to investigate.
Just when you thought the situation could not get worse, the SBE has confirmed their policy to not notify voters if their ballot has been voted multiple times.
The truly important question is what are the implications of the Maryland State Board of Elections literally giving away our hard-fought right to vote?
In the near term, this could significantly affect the outcome of the Democrat primary coming up on May 14. The U.S. Senate primary on the Democrat side is a heated battle between the endlessly selffunded David Trone and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. The results will reverberate for years to come.
There are a host of local races for county leadership positions, few of which might be more important for crime statistics in the state than the outcome of the Baltimore race. In the Democratic primary, sitting Mayor Brandon Scott is facing off against former
Mayor Sheila Dixon, among others.
With our new mail-in ballot application, if someone has intentions to illegally cast ballots for others, no one needs to have actual people showing up at polls to vote. Instead, a bad actor can simply order voters’ ballots. The unaware voter, whose ballot was ordered and sent to a different address or fax number, would only learn their ballot was taken if they showed up to vote in person and were given a provisional ballot instead because the system showed them as already having voted.
Shouldn’t Maryland voters have confidence that they will be the one and only person allowed to cast their ballot? Don’t we all want clean voter rolls? It is time for the new leadership at the Maryland State Board of Elections to prove they do, too.