RNC Files Election Integrity Lawsuit In Maryland Over Huge Discrepancy
The Republican National Committee on Friday launched a major legal challenge against Maryland election officials, accusing the state of allowing its voter-registration rolls to swell far beyond plausible levels and violating federal law in the process. According to the lawsuit, multiple Maryland counties have registration rates so inflated that they exceed the number of adult citizens who actually live there.
The complaint highlights two of the state’s largest counties, both of which report more registered voters than adult citizens, an impossibility under any legitimate registration system. Ten additional counties were found to have registration rates above 95% of their adult-citizen populations — a stark contrast to the roughly 75.6% statewide registration rate cited from 2022 Census data, according to the Daily Caller.
“Marylanders deserve to have confidence in their elections and to know that their state is properly maintaining its voter rolls,” RNC Chair Joe Gruters said. “The State Board of Elections has failed to do its job and remove ineligible or deceased voters from its rolls. Marylanders have a right to accurate voter rolls, which is why the RNC is suing today.”
The lawsuit accuses Maryland officials of failing to meet the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which mandates states make reasonable efforts to remove outdated, duplicate, or ineligible voters.
That failure was echoed in an October 2023 audit by the Maryland General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Audits, which found the State Board of Elections’ review process “remained inadequate.” The audit identified “2,426 potentially deceased individuals with active voter registration and 327 individuals with potential duplicate voter registrations,” raising deep concerns about how Maryland manages its rolls.
Such lapses, the lawsuit argues, “burdens the right to vote of the individual Plaintiffs and all individual members of the RNC and MDGOP who are lawfully registered to vote in Maryland by undermining their confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, discouraging their participation in the democratic process, and instilling in them the fear that their legitimate votes will be nullified or diluted by unlawful votes.”
Making matters worse for Maryland, the U.S. Department of Justice has also filed suit against the state for refusing to turn over requested voter-registration lists — part of a broader federal effort to force more than half of U.S. states to clean up their rolls. According to a senior DOJ official, prosecutors believe election-lax behavior in several Democrat-run states may not be accidental.
“The sloppiness of the elections in blue states is no accident. It is on purpose. It is a feature, not a bug,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet J. Dhillon told Just the News.
“And the goal is to cram as many people on there and make voters who are not particularly engaged, make it easy for someone else to help them fill out their ballot and return it for them when they didn’t care enough to do it themselves,” she added.
Dhillon emphasized that enforcing federal election law includes ensuring states maintain accurate voter rolls: “What we can do at the federal government level is ensure that our federal election laws are observed, and that includes each state’s requirement to keep clean voter rolls,” she said. “That is a fundamental basic.”
Her comments came one day after the DOJ filed lawsuits against six Democrat-led states — Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Washington state and Vermont — demanding access to their voter-registration lists to investigate potential violations, outdated entries, and other irregularities.
Dhillon’s office also recently reached an agreement with North Carolina requiring the state to review and fix more than 100,000 registrations that were added without complying with state law.
According to Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division is now on track — through legal action, settlements, or voluntary cooperation — to force at least 26 states to update and clean their voter rolls.
“We’re now in litigation with 14 states. So the six yesterday included Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Washington State and Vermont. That adds to eight we already had going,” she said.
The RNC’s Maryland suit adds yet another front in the nationwide battle over election integrity — a fight that conservatives argue is essential heading into President Donald J. Trump’s second-term agenda to restore confidence in America’s electoral system.