President Donald Trump called for a Justice Department investigation Monday into a printing error that forced Maryland to reissue roughly half a million mail ballots ahead of the state's June 23 primary, using the incident to revive claims of electoral fraud despite election officials' assurances that safeguards prevent any voting irregularity.
The trouble began when a vendor shipped primary ballots to some voters for the wrong party. Since election officials could not pinpoint exactly which ballots went to which voters, the state decided to send replacement ballots to all potentially affected voters and void the original batch.
Trump seized on the error Friday in a Truth Social post, describing the original ballots as "Illegal Mail In Ballots" and questioning what would happen to them. "They sent out 500,000 Illegal Mail In Ballots, and they got caught," Trump wrote. "So now, they're going to send out 500,000 more Mail In Ballots, but nobody knows what's happening with the first 500,000 they sent."
Maryland's State Board of Elections pushed back against the insinuation of misconduct. The board said the original ballots will be sequestered and destroyed, not counted. Election officials emphasized that their systems contain multiple layers of protection: each return envelope carries a unique identifier tied to a single voter, preventing duplicate voting. "There is no risk of duplicate voting as a result of this issue," the board stated Monday.
The printing company responsible for the error will bear the cost of reissuing the ballots. State elections officials did not name the vendor publicly.
Trump also took aim at Democratic Governor Wes Moore in his post, calling him "corrupt," though the governor had nothing to do with the vendor's mistake. Neither Moore's office nor the Justice Department responded to requests for comment Monday.
The Maryland incident fits a broader pattern for Trump, who has made mail voting a central target since 2020. He signed an executive order this year aimed at restricting mail balloting, and the mail-voting issue has been foundational to his repeated false claims of widespread election fraud. Maryland's experience with the printing error provides Trump fresh ammunition, even as state officials maintain that their election security measures worked as intended.
Author Sarah Mitchell: "Trump's demand for a federal investigation into a vendor's mistake that the state already caught and fixed is classic playbook: take a real administrative hiccup and turn it into fraud theater."
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