BALTIMORE — In a move that elections experts say could further erode confidence in the voting process, a group of Maryland voters aligned with Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox’s campaign plans on challenging the legitimacy of ballots across the state immediately after Election Day.
The group, which previously raised concerns over false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, is attempting to recruit hundreds of volunteers to hand-count paper ballots starting the morning after the Nov. 8 election, according to the group’s leader and a memo circulated by another grassroots organization.
Although the Maryland Voter Integrity Group said the plan “will restore confidence and encourage transparency for all Maryland voters,” the steps outlined in the memo appear to be an audit or recount that state law already provides for under specific circumstances — but in this case would be organized independently rather than through certified officials.
“It raises a little bit of concern for me of having a whole lot of people who lack confidence in our election system, potentially because they are fueled by misinformation, making a request that is unlikely to be granted,” said David Levine, an elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Security Democracy, a nonpartisan initiative within the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Then you have this sort of cycle of distrust and suspicion that could fuel further problems.”
Robyn Sachs, the Voter Integrity group’s leader, said during a recent event with Republican lieutenant governor nominee Gordana Schifanelli that volunteers will “retabulate the paper ballots” out of a fear that the ballot-scanning machines would not scan them properly.
They will also look at the results as a whole to see if there is “anything strange happening” and “any sign of an algorithm,” Sachs said, according to an audio recording of the event heard by The Baltimore Sun.
Sachs said her group would then communicate with the Cox campaign and “contribute to help them get the hand-count through the board of elections.”
Cox, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump who still believes that Trump lost the 2020 election only because of election fraud, is widely considered to be facing an uphill battle against Democrat Wes Moore in a state where Trump lost to President Joe Biden by 33 percentage points.
Cox has refused to say he will accept the outcome of next month’s election when repeatedly asked in recent weeks.
Outside the Maryland Court of Appeals building in Annapolis last week after the final hearing in his failed effort to stop the early counting of mail-in ballots, he answered a question about accepting the results by talking about potential recounts.
“The state law makes it very clear that there is a process to examine the counting issues if there are any anomalies,” Cox said. “I will support the process at every step and that includes the right of every candidate on the ballot to have a recount if necessary to look at those results.”
Asked whether he already has specific plans to request a recount in his race, Cox said he did not. He also said he was recruiting poll watchers but that he is not recruiting “people to work the ballot issues and potentially look at those issues.”
At Schifanelli’s Sep. 27 event in Potomac, Schifanelli and Sachs made pitches to recruit poll watchers, judges of elections and poll workers.
“What we do have is our field captains, which are people who are actually volunteering,” Schifanelli said. “We need the judges. We need election judges. We need observers. And the best part about this is that we do have a lot of people that are signing up but we need more.”
It’s unclear how many volunteers the campaign has recruited, and whether they will in-fact be in official positions responsible for running precincts, such as judges of elections. Observers are permitted to watch the canvassing process as ballots are reviewed in a public setting, but they are not allowed to touch ballots. Only staff hired by the local boards of election are permitted to handle the ballots.
In an interview after Wednesday’s debate between Cox and Democrat Wes Moore, Schifanelli said she wants to “ensure that every person regardless of their party affiliation is comfortable that their vote’s counted.” She emphasized that she’s a lawyer who needs “evidence” and “facts,” though a campaign staffer interrupted and abruptly ended the interview when Schifanelli said she knows “nothing about” the state’s existing audit and recount laws.
A memo produced by the Maryland Voter Integrity Group and circulated by Patriot Club of America, another conservative grassroots organization, explains that “captains” will be assigned to each of Maryland’s 24 counties. The captains will select precincts in their county in a “confidential random drawing” and then assign one Republican and one Democratic volunteer to each precinct.
Beginning 8 a.m. Nov. 9, the volunteers are supposed to commence the “double check program” by working “peacefully together to hand count paper ballots,” the memo reads. Targeting the races for governor, attorney general, U.S. Congress and school board, the volunteers will compare the hand-counted totals to the machine readings and look for “no votes, overvotes, or otherwise invalid ballots.”
Sachs, at the Schifanelli event, said the aim is to recruit 600 volunteers. The email from Patriot Club of America outlines the need for 576 volunteers — a pair in a dozen precincts in every county — plus 124 extra “patriots” on hand if needed.
Sachs did not return multiple calls for comment for this story.
Levine said there’s nothing in the law that would allow the group to carry out its plans.
He pointed to the state’s auditing laws that already require a manual audit of at least 2% of precincts plus some ballots cast during early voting and other provisional ballots — and a separate automated ballot tabulation audit, which uses completely separate, independent software to verify the tabulation.
“This is a bid of a head scratcher in that I’m not sure how the voter integrity group hopes to succeed. Certainly folks can … raise alarms and try to apply pressure but the rules are the rules and Maryland law is pretty explicit for what it allows,” Levine said.
According to State Board of Elections guidelines, at least one precinct in every jurisdiction must conduct the postelection manual ballot tabulation audit of the same statewide race. The audits are conducted by the local boards of election but the race selected for the audit, as well as the randomly selected precincts, are the responsibility of the state board within 15 days of the election.
Local boards must provide public notice and conduct the audit within 120 days after the election.
If the audit reveals any discrepancies greater than 0.05%, another audit is triggered. In 2020, the local boards audited a total of 62,084 ballots and revealed a vote discrepancy of 0.0064%. Another “automated ballot tabulation audit” of the voting system revealed the more-than 3 million ballots cast in the presidential race were counted accurately.
Recounts, meanwhile, can only occur after a race is certified, which can take weeks after Election Day. Only the candidate can petition for a recount, and only if the margin of difference between the top two vote-getters is less than 5%.
Sachs, at the Schifanelli event, claimed Maryland’s elections were not “transparent and auditable,” and said the inspiration for the “double-check program” came from a Pennsylvania group, Audit the Vote PA, whose methods for claiming voter fraud have been found to include extensive errors.
Schifanelli has, like Cox, repeated false claims for fraud. At the Potomac event and in an interview, she discussed concerns about what she said were “chain of custody issues,” including an unfounded claim about 120,000 ballots that “ended up in a ditch” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2020.
Todd Eberly, a professor of political science at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, said while the upcoming efforts are claimed to be intended to restore confidence in the election, the effect is the opposite.
“The purpose of this is to undermine confidence in the election, to create doubt where there’s no reason for it to exist,” Eberly said. “It’s not an innocuous thing. It’s a dangerous thing.”
Levine said the plans are also emblematic of a larger national threat of having 2020 election deniers get in positions of helping run elections.
“The possibility of an insider interfering in the conduct of the election, or casting doubt on its legitimacy, is no longer a hypothetical remote scenario,” said Levine, who recently published research on the issue of vetting poll workers to mitigate subversion efforts. “It is a concern and it’s one that election officials unfortunately now need to plan for as well.”
