Maryland needs clean, up-to-date voter rolls

The state should adopt best practices even as it rejects Trump's demands

Is it too much to ask Montgomery County to find a way to remove from its rolls the names of voters who died 10, 20 or even 30 years ago? I think it’s a reasonable ask, and so does Mark Uncapher, writing at Maryland Reporter. Uncapher, who is secretary of the Maryland Republican Party, offers examples of residents of his own apartment building in Chevy Chase who he says are still on the voting rolls despite recorded ages of 115, 117, and 114. The three residents in question died in 2003, 2013, and 1995, respectively.

If that’s accurate, the third-named resident has been on the Maryland rolls for thirty years since his death, and the others for roughly a decade or two since theirs. A Silver Spring woman is still on the rolls at the unlikely age of 131.

Now, as Uncapher is careful to add, the presence of stale names doesn’t mean they’ve been fraudulently voted. Election fraud is not Montgomery County’s style. But it does strongly imply that the county, for whatever reason, has fallen short on its responsibility to keep rolls properly clean. That’s bad for everyone, whether or not anyone misuses the loose names for whatever purpose, whether at the polls or by turning them into bogus signatures in support of some ballot initiative.

It’s also a failure that appears to be county-specific. (In Maryland, counties take the lead in election administration.) Uncapher writes that “among Maryland’s 308 voters aged 110 or older, roughly 70 percent reside in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties....Curiously, my single [Chevy Chase] precinct reportedly has more ‘super-aged’ voters than the entire city of Baltimore.”

Let me add a bit of personal experience for what it may be worth. I’ve canvassed voters door-to-door a fair bit in three Maryland counties, Frederick, Howard, and Montgomery. In Frederick and Howard counties, it was rare for me to be told at the door that no person of that name lived at the residence. In Montgomery, it happened a lot.

None of which is intended to take the Trump administration’s side in its newest legal dispute with Maryland. In December, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Maryland suggesting that the state had failed to comply with federal laws, including the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the former of which requires states to institute “a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names” of voters ineligible through death or change of address and the latter of which sets minimum standards for voter registration systems.

The Trump suit also demands the state’s voter rolls, a demand already rejected by federal courts in at least two states. Maryland’s officials, including Attorney General Anthony Brown and elections administrator Jared DeMarinis, are right to be concerned that for Trump to obtain custody of the voter rolls would endanger privacy (consider the DOGE experience) and pave the way for misuse of the information obtained.

But leaving aside the (important and legitimate) debates over how much federal meddling is too much, counties like Montgomery should want cleaner rolls for their own sake. Even aside from the annoyance to canvassers in knocking defunct doors, and the risk that at some point down the road bad actors will begin making sinister use of stale names, messy rolls distort estimates of turnout, complicate various forms of integrity control, and inflate the already inordinate cost of campaigning by inducing candidates to send their glossy mailers to thousands of imaginary households. If Baltimore can do better, so can the rest of us.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash