BALTIMORE — Maryland elections officials have spent years batting down false claims of voter fraud and bolstering the state’s mail-in voting process. Now, as President Donald Trump once again tries to intervene in how states run elections, they’re pushing back — saying his latest efforts will undermine confidence in the process, while Maryland Republicans say the moves will help assure voters.

Since mid-July, the Maryland State Board of Elections has turned down multiple attempts from the Department of Justice to obtain voter registration and other personal information. Trump’s more recent comments about wanting to eliminate mail-in voting have also raised alarms — introducing more anxiety, some say, in a method that nearly a third of Maryland voters used last year.

“We had over 880,000 Marylanders use mail-in voting” in 2024, said Jared DeMarinis, Maryland’s top elections administrator. “It is a very popular method in the state of Maryland and it is a safe and secure method. People feel confident in using it.”

Trump’s disdain for mail-in voting has carried on for years. He said last month he would try to ban it nationwide, one of several election-focused efforts that include imposing a requirement for voters to show identification and proof of citizenship at the polls.

Democrats and independent elections experts say Trump doesn’t have the authority to make those changes, and Democrats in control in Maryland are unlikely to voluntarily follow his lead. Some Maryland Republicans, however, say they should.

“If there is mail-in voting, speaking from the Republican side, we need to utilize it as much as we can. But should we have it or not is a different question,” said Neil Parrott, a Republican who is considering a fourth consecutive run for Congress after losing the last three in the district covering Western Maryland.

Parrott, from Frederick County, won about 19,000 more votes than now-U.S. Rep. April McClain Delaney did through in-person early voting and on Election Day last fall. But McClain Delaney’s roughly 40,000 more mail-in votes than Parrott helped her secure the win overall.

The Maryland Republican Party supports ending universal mail-in voting, Chair Nicole Beus Harris said in a statement, alleging the process “is clearly subject to potential fraud.”

State Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat and the most active legislator on elections issues, said mail-in voting has proven to be safe and convenient.

“There is no reason to sow doubt in vote-by-mail,” Kagan said, calling it “one of the best developments in our elections process in decades.”

A renewed fight

Trump’s comments have come after a tumultuous five years for elections across the country and ahead of a 2026 midterm election that will determine how much power the president has for the second half of his term.

In Maryland, the pandemic-inspired spike in mail-in voting led to drawn-out battles, including whether ballots that arrive after Election Day can be counted and how much time elections staff have to handle and tabulate those votes.

Multiple lawsuits have also involved the state’s database of 4.3 million registered voters as Trump and his supporters raised concerns about fraud across the country.

The Justice Department’s July 14 request in Maryland was the latest foray in that area. Similar to requests in dozens of other states, the Justice Department said it was seeking the Maryland voter list as well as the names of election officials responsible for maintaining it.

A variety of other questions involved alleged inconsistencies with different forms of voter data and an audit released in 2023 that found the Maryland agency was not “as comprehensive as necessary” in identifying deceased individuals who were still registered to vote. The audit did not find evidence of widespread fraud or any material impacts on election results.

DeMarinis responded in a lengthy letter two weeks later and then again in mid-August when the Justice Department formally submitted its request through the process that allows anyone to purchase the full voter database for $125. The list may only be used for purposes “related to the electoral process,” DeMarinis wrote, inquiring about the reason for the request and whether it involved enforcing immigration laws or in ways that would intimidate voters.

“Maryland voters have the right to know what the Department intends to do with the state’s voter registration list,” he wrote.

After the Justice Department replied asking for even more information, including voters’ driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, DeMarinis asked again for the reason and noted that those personal details are not typically subject to disclosure.

The Justice Department did not respond to specific questions from The Baltimore Sun about its request in Maryland. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement that the Department “has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”

DeMarinis said in an interview that the State Board of Elections is willing to coordinate on investigating specific cases of potentially illegal activities. But the requests for personal information was “worrisome and definitely requires follow-up,” he said.

Michael Hanmer, a professor and director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, said “there’s a serious threat to what this does to undermine people’s confidence in our system.”

“There’s very little reason to worry about fraud based on all of the evidence that’s been gathered to try to assess it,” Hanmer said. “I understand people being concerned with potential for fraud, but the existence of fraud is exceedingly rare.”

Parrott and other Maryland Republicans said cooperating with the Trump administration would help build confidence in the system, not diminish it.

“Maryland should be working with the federal government in every opportunity,” said Del. Steven Arentz, a Queen Anne’s County Republican. “If this were not Donald Trump doing this, then it wouldn’t be as big of a deal.”

Arentz has previously sponsored state legislation that would allow individual voters to opt out of the ability for the state to provide their voter registration data to anyone who asks for it. He said he was inspired to introduce the idea because some of his constituents were concerned that their party affiliation was publicly accessible.

“They felt it was violating their personal business and people were judging them that way,” Arentz said.

Delegate Bob Long, a Baltimore County Republican who has sponsored multiple voter ID bills, said Maryland officials should provide the list to Trump. He also said they should work with him to restrict mail-in voting — pointing, in part, to an issue in Baltimore in 2022 when a dozen flash drives containing precinct vote totals were temporarily missing (which was not an issue related to mail-in ballots).

Still, Long said he prefers the previous system when absentee ballots were permitted mainly for service members stationed outside the state and others who gave a reason they couldn’t vote in person.

“It has been proven that some of the ballots have been lost, they have went to the wrong addresses and people fill them out. It just sets up a scenario where fraud could be widespread,” Long said.

DeMarinis and others said there is always going to be room for improvement, but concerns raised by Trump and his supporters are unfounded.

“We have been through every nook and cranny of our election laws, and if there’s new technology that causes us to take another look and tweak something, that’s what we do,” Kagan said. “But fundamentally, we have an excellent election system.”

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