BALTIMORE (CN) — Saying it can prevent “unwarranted suspicion and mistrust in Maryland’s electoral process,” the Maryland Board of Elections filed an emergency petition Friday for permission to begin counting mail-in ballots on October 1 instead of after Election Day as currently mandated.
It’s the latest twist in a knot of legal uncertainty surrounding the state’s election system, which is the only one in the United States that prevents officials from counting early ballots early.
“Faced with three-to-four times as many ballots and failing to count a single one of them until two days after the election may require 100 to 120 days (or nearly 4 months),” says the petition, filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court by Daniel M. Kobrin of the Attorney General’s Office. “Maryland, however, does not have 100 days; Maryland does not even have the 36 days that the primary canvass required.”
The delay in certifying elections could prevent elected representatives from being seated in January as required by law.
The board voted to take this step on August 15, and Governor Larry Hogan gave his blessing. “The governor strongly supports the board finally taking action to adopt early canvassing — as he did for the 2020 election — and address the General Assembly’s failure to pass a simple bill that would have allowed it to happen,” his spokesman Michael Ricci said at the time, adding that the administration hopes the court “will act swiftly.”
In May, however, Hogan vetoed legislation that would have done the same thing, saying other parts of the bills did not meet his standards for election integrity. It was Hogan himself who instituted an executive order in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, greatly expanding mail-in voting and allowing the elections board to count those votes in secret starting in October. The emergency order expired this year, ushering in reinstatement of the law requiring absentee ballots be counted last. That threw the July 19 primary election into turmoil.
“The sheer number of ballots caused cascading issues through the local and statewide canvassing and certification process,” the petition says. “In Montgomery County, a recount of the race for County Executive could not begin until August 19, 2022, or 31 days after election day. It was concluded, with final local certification of the results, on August 24, 2022, which was 36 days after election day. In Frederick County, issues with the mail-in ballot canvass required the local board of elections to decertify its results on August 10, 2022, and re-scan all 15,640 mail-in ballots it received.”
In all, more than half the votes cast in the election were mailed. Prior to 2020, the typical figure was 5%.
The board projects it will receive three times as many mail-in ballots in the general election: between 1 million and 1.3 million.
Kobrin says there’s not timeline for the petition, as there’s no respondent. “Along with the petition we filed a motion for expedited hearing,” he says, “asking the court hear it as soon as it’s practicable to do so.”
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