Elections board files motion to stop lawsuit, says plaintiffs are ‘trying to disenfranchise Maryland voters’
The Maryland State Board of Elections on Monday filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group alleging improper maintenance of its voter rolls ahead of the May 14 primary election.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in March on behalf of United Sovereign Americans, a nonprofit Missouri corporation, and Maryland Election Integrity, a limited liability corporation founded by a South Carolina lawyer, alleges that the State Board of Elections is in violation of federal law because there are voters of questionable status on its rolls, including people who have moved out of state, died or did not list a certified address.
In the motion to dismiss, the elections board argued the court does not have the authority to rule over the case, and that the plaintiffs complaint does not include enough facts to bring the case to trial.
“The election is in full swing, everything is going according to laws and regulations and policy,” Jared DeMarinis, the state administrator of elections, said Tuesday. “We’re canvassing the votes, so I think Marylanders can take comfort and confidence that this is going to be a secure election that, when the results occur, they can have trust in those results.”
According to DeMarinis, over 124,000 ballots have been returned already. Some local elections boards began counting and processing ballots Monday.
The State Board of Elections is represented by the attorney general’s office.
C. Edward Hartman III, the Annapolis-based attorney representing United Sovereign Americans and Maryland Election Integrity was not immediately available for comment.
A Monday news release from the elections board said an independent legislative audit conducted last year found the agency maintained a voter registration system with few inaccuracies. County elections boards also removed nearly all deceased voters from their rolls, and only 286 records in the database documenting over 4 million active voters in Maryland were found to be duplicates, according to the release.
The same audit found that elections officials did not expediently notify authorities of more than 100 voters who successfully voted twice in 2020, but did not call the integrity of any election results into question or find any instance of widespread fraud.
DeMarinis said that Monday’s motion was filed to stop non-Maryland residents from “trying to disenfranchise Maryland voters.”
In a March statement, Joanne Antoine, the executive director of Common Cause Maryland, called the lawsuit an “attempt to sow doubt” regarding the state’s elections process.
United Sovereign Americans is chaired by Harry Haury, who was “directly involved with elections systems analysis after the 2020 election,” the organization’s website says.
Maryland is the first state to face a legal challenge from United Sovereign Americans, a volunteer-run organization that legally challenges state elections boards it deems are not in compliance with federal elections laws.
The group is prepared to file lawsuits in nine states, and is collecting evidence in 13 more, according to its website. They are seeking a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ahead the general election on Nov. 5.
“Where our litigation strategy differs from others is that we are not challenging the outcome of elections,” the website says. “We are demanding that election officials follow existing laws to ensure that the civil rights of all Americans are upheld.”
“I think its indicative of the fact that these cases aren’t really about what they say they’re about,” said Lauren Miller, counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York City.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Miller said the mission of organizations like the United Sovereign Americans is to “sow seeds of doubt” about election integrity before voters even hit the polls.
The lawsuit in Maryland is in line with a larger effort to target aspects of the voting process on behalf of the Republican Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, who will likely face a rematch against President Joe Biden — the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Miller called United Sovereign Americans’ tactic of filing lawsuits to challenge boards of elections’ adherence to the law over election results a litigation strategy, and said one organization affiliated with the group has received a cease and desist letter from New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The trend in elections lawsuits challenging voter rolls, voter IDs and voting by mail began to skyrocket following the 2020 general election when Trump and his allies failed to overturn his loss to Biden.
Maryland is no stranger to challenges to its electoral processes.
Former state delegate and Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, a Trump ally, sought an emergency order to curb the early counting of mail-in ballots ahead of the 2022 general election when he faced Wes Moore, a Democrat.
Hartman also represented Cox in that court filing. His request was denied, as was his petition for the Supreme Court to review Maryland’s mail-in ballot process.
Miller said that the country is facing “a totally new landscape post-2020,” but lawsuits akin to what the board of elections is currently attempting to dismiss are more likely to pop up in presidential election cycles.
“I do not foresee them having any actual teeth. They really are frivolous claims when you look at the methodological errors,” she said. “That said, it’s not clear that these claims have any real intention of being successful in court.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.