Tea at Trianon: Election Integrity Fiasco in Maryland

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, June 26, 2026

Election Integrity Fiasco in Maryland

From American Thinker:

Maryland election officials are facing a serious test of public trust after a vendor coding error reportedly caused some voters to receive incorrect mail-in ballots during the 2026 gubernatorial primary.  The error involved ballots mailed before May 14, 2026.

Maryland State Board of Elections (SBE) administrator Jared DeMarinis said at the May 28, 2026 state election board meeting that more than 563,000 voters were included in the affected mailing but that the “vendor could not accurately identify” which voters had received the wrong ballot.  DeMarinis further clarified that there were “over 447,000 voters” whose ballots may have been affected.  The board identified the error and attempted to correct it by sending out hundreds of thousands of replacement ballots.  President Trump commented on the matter shortly after the issue became public.
Kate Sullivan, director of the SecuretheVoteMD, a volunteer election integrity organization, believes that the election board likely chose a remedy that was not only unnecessarily chaotic, but legally questionable under Maryland law:

The State Board of Elections had a simple, legal solution sitting right in front of them. They should have complied with Maryland Election Law §11-303.2 — the “first ballot” rule, which requires them to verify the original ballots as they come in, count the correct ones, and cure the incorrect ones while there was still time.

That is exactly what the law requires. Instead, they flooded the system with replacement ballots, locked the originals in a vault until certification day, and issued guidance that overrides the “first ballot” statute entirely. One has to ask, when an election authority ignores an obvious lawful remedy and chooses a legally questionable path that potentially disenfranchises voters, it is no longer sufficient to call it a mistake. Marylanders deserve a full accounting of why this approach was chosen — and by whom.

Now SecuretheVoteMD is demanding that the Maryland State Board of Elections take five concrete steps before the November 3, 2026 general election to protect voters from disenfranchisement.  In sum, the organization is asking election officials to address key questions on the record: how the original erroneous ballots are being identified, what adjudication standard is being applied, how many original-batch ballots were received, how many were rejected, what notification process will be used for affected voters, and how the chain of custody was maintained from receipt through counting. (Read more.)