Mail ballot mishap that irked Trump ‘fixed’ ahead of fall election, company says

The company responsible for a ballot-printing error that resulted in the reissue of hundreds of thousands of ballots in Maryland assured election officials that it has put new safeguards in place to prevent similar problems in the future.

Taylor Print & Visual Impressions appeared before the bipartisan Maryland State Board of Elections Thursday to address the mishap that thrust the state into the national spotlight.

Representatives for the Minnesota-based company said they had resolved a coding error that caused some voters to receive primary election ballots for the wrong political party. Because the company could not determine which voters were affected, the state had to send replacement ballots to roughly 447,000 voters. Taylor did not charge the state for the additional mailings.

The company took full responsibility for the printing error, saying it was the first of its kind in Taylor’s six years working in elections. Taylor’s parent company has been in business for 50 years.

“It was an honest mistake, but it was our mistake and we do own that,” said Traci Stevenson, a representative for Taylor.

In the wake of the issue, the company has developed new checklists and automated tools to prevent the same mistake from happening. Staff were retrained, and senior leadership must now conduct a final “go/no-go” review before ballots are sent, Stevenson said.

“The problem has been fixed, the safeguards are in place, and we’re ready to perform for the general election,” she added.

Taylor’s representatives said there was nothing that Maryland could have done differently to prevent the problem.

The mix-up attracted the attention of President Donald Trump, who used Maryland and other states to underscore his case for restricting the use of mail voting. Trump has faulted mail voting as one of the reasons he lost the 2020 election, which he maintains without evidence was rigged in favor of Joe Biden.

Maryland came to use Taylor as its primary contractor after a dispute with a different ballot vendor. SeaChange, also in Minnesota, backed out of its contract with Maryland several weeks before the 2020 general election, leaving officials scrambling. Maryland was implementing widespread mail voting in response to the pandemic that year, and SeaChange was late in mailing ballots to key areas of the state ahead of the primary.

SeaChange blamed state officials for the issue, while the election board accused the company of repeatedly lying.

Taylor, which had a smaller contract with the state at the time, was tapped for the larger ballot-printing contract in 2021. Last year, the state election board renewed its contract with Taylor through December 2027, increasing the contract’s total value to $8.9 million.

At a previous meeting of the election board, Vice Chair Jim Shalleck, a Republican, proposed commissioning an outside investigation into the ballot mishap. His fellow members and State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis encouraged him to question the vendor himself.

Shalleck asked several pointed questions Thursday, including whether Taylor does work in “Republican states.”

“We’re a nonpartisan company,” Stevenson responded. “We don’t take that into consideration.”

Board Chair Michael Summers interjected, asking who the governor of Maryland was in 2020, when Taylor began working with the state.

“It was Hogan, a Republican,” Summers said, answering his own question.

Taylor does work in Minnesota, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Ballot-printing errors are not uncommon, but the Maryland election board has felt additional pressure to investigate the contract amid scrutiny from the president. In May, Trump blamed Democratic Gov. Wes Moore for the mishap and asked the Justice Department to investigate.

“He allowed this to happen in order to make sure that Democrats win,” Trump said on the social media platform X. “It never made sense to me that Maryland was considered an automatic Democrat State, but now I see why.”

Vincent Gisriel, an Eastern Shore resident who attended Thursday’s virtual meeting, said he was disappointed that DeMarinis seemed to discourage an independent probe.

“I strongly suggest the members of the State Board of Elections call for an outside investigation of the entire matter,” Gisriel said. “The citizens of Maryland deserve full transparency.”