“So in Maryland, as you probably saw, they had 500 -- 500,000 mail in votes that were corrupt. They were corrupt. They said the printer made a mistake. Don't believe that.”

There was a real error, and it was a vendor coding mistake rather than corruption. The Maryland State Board of Elections disclosed that an error in the coding at its mail-in ballot vendor sent some voters the wrong party ballot, and that because the vendor could not identify who had received a correct ballot, the board sent a new ballot to every voter who had requested one by mail. The board's replacement notice attributes the problem to the printing process, limits it to ballots mailed before May 14, 2026, and records that replacements went out from May 22. Maryland's State Administrator of Elections had publicly rejected the fake-ballot claim days before he made it, saying no fake mail-in ballots were distributed.

The scale of the reissue is close to his number, and that is the claim's best defence. About 447,000 mail-in ballots had been requested and were being reissued, and the state could not tell correct ballots from incorrect ones, which is why it replaced them all. What the reissue was not is a finding that any vote was corrupt. Officials said an original ballot would still be counted if it was the correct ballot and no replacement came back.