The Maryland State Board of Elections is planning to bring its mail ballot vendor in for questioning after a massive error forced the reissue of hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots.
The board has invited officials from Taylor Print & Visual Impressions to its July 23rd meeting to ask what went wrong.
Taylor did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
The Minnesota-based vendor sent some voters ballots for the wrong party and wasn’t able to determine which voters were affected. The mix-up drew scrutiny from President Donald Trump, who is seeking to restrict the use of mail voting, and put Maryland’s elections under a national spotlight.
Errors have always occurred, but the difference now is that a statewide mistake lands on the administrator to find and manage a possibly much bigger fix with the vendor, said Alysoun McLaughlin, director of the Election Resilience Lab at the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.
State election officials scrambled to alert voters to the mistake, telling them by postcard, email and text message to cast ballots marked “replacement” instead of the first ballots sent out.
A statewide count of voters who cast the initial mail ballot without submitting a replacement ballot was unavailable, but Central Maryland election board responses showed that voters largely followed those instructions.
As of July 5, roughly one-third of primary votes cast were by mail — or nearly 300,000 votes. Elections officials in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard and Montgomery counties reported Monday they had received roughly 9,000 original ballots from voters who had not also submitted a replacement ballot.
At the board’s June 25th meeting, Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis assured members that they would get to hear firsthand from Taylor.
“That gets them right in front of the Maryland public and quite frankly the American public,” said board member Eric Bryant, a Democrat appointed by Gov. Wes Moore.
Some board members said they’d received emails and calls from voters demanding to know what happened.
History of vendor errors
Outsourcing ballot mailings has become necessary as more citizens have demanded voting by mail, experts said.
This isn’t Maryland’s first ballot error, said McLaughlin, who compiled a report of the state’s experience with elections vendors since it started contracting for ballot mailing services in 2012. Taylor is the state’s fourth vendor, she noted.
Through the years, vendors have sent ballots with a missing page, printed envelopes with incorrect postal codes, and provided the wrong return envelope, which routed ballots to a different county.
Recently, ballot vendor SeaChange quit in the middle of the 2020 election cycle after the state board blamed them for proofing errors during the primary.
“This is the first time we’ve had this many voters’ ballots reissued,” McLaughlin said.
The former Montgomery County elections board member recalled when local officials sat around folding tables for hours stuffing voter packets into envelopes by hand. With hundreds of thousands of voters wanting mail ballots, that’s no longer possible, she said.
McLaughlin cautioned against a ”knee-jerk reaction” that would return to the way things were. She said the moment requires the state to question how it can better manage and oversee the vendor relationship.
“If you just fire the vendor every time there’s a problem, then at some point you run through the list of the vendors that have the capacity to do this work,” she said.
Voters got the message
Meanwhile, local elections boards are wrapping up their ballot counting, using long-standing protocols to ensure that only one ballot from each voter is counted.
After being notified of the error in May, the state sent a follow-up postcard to affected voters, telling them what happened and instructing them to vote using a soon-to-arrive replacement ballot in the mail.
The board sent more than 375,000 texts and 1.5 million emails with similar alerts, according to an online report.
Local boards were instructed to set aside those original mail ballots and void them only if that same voter sent in a replacement mail ballot or voted by provisional ballot.
The state spending board in December 2025 approved the board’s request to renew its contract with Taylor through December 2027, making the contract’s total value $8.9 million since 2021.
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