Elections panel approves guidelines to 'address the canvassing issue'
Maryland’s five-member state election board unanimously approved a set of public guidelines Tuesday laying out how thousands of mail-in ballots will be tabulated for the primary election.
The guidelines were needed to address the “canvassing issue” created when more than 437,000 mail-in ballots had to be replaced late last month. The rules made public Tuesday lay out instructions on how local election boards are to treat the original, potentially erroneous ballots and the replacements meant to correct the issue.
“If you vote the replacement ballot, the replacement ballot counts. If you vote in person and you voted the original ballot, you’ll vote a provisional ballot. Then that provisional ballot will count over your original ballot,” said Maryland Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis after the meeting.
“If you vote neither the replacement or the provisional ballot, and all we get is the original ballot back, then it goes into three buckets.”
https://marylandmatters.org/2026/06/10/elections-panel-approves-guidelines-to-address-the-canvassing-issue/