Politics

With court cases against local, state and congressional redistricting plans proceeding, election officials across Maryland are scrambling to prepare for the fast-approaching June 28 primary. Local election officials face a titanic amount of work to be ready for the primary election, said David Garreis, who is Anne Arundel County’s election director and president of the Maryland Association of Election Officials.

Republican candidate for governor Kelly Schulz announced that Jeff Woolford, a Maryland Department of Health official, will join her ticket as running mate for lieutenant governor. Woolford, a first-time candidate, is the chief medical officer and an assistant secretary for the agency. He previously held several other roles under Gov. Larry Hogan, a fellow Republican, including a stint in 2020 as chief of staff for the Department of Human Services.

Carroll County residents will vote to elect members to the Board of County Commissioners this year. One incumbent is preparing to run for reelection and several new faces have added their names to the ballot so far. The primary election is currently planned for June 28 and the general election is on Nov. 8. Carroll County is governed by five commissioners, each representing one of five districts that the county is split into geographically.

Maryland lawmakers will consider today whether to rescind a statewide emergency regulation mandating the use of face masks in schools following several weeks of pressure from the governor, Republican lawmakers and some parents. The General Assembly’s administrative, executive and legislative review committee will take up the matter at a virtual hearing at 2:30 p.m. at the request of the state’s Board of Education.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Baltimore County from using its newly drawn map of County Council districts, saying the boundaries would diminish Black voters’ opportunity to elect their chosen candidates. U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby ordered the county to adopt a new redistricting map that either includes two “reasonably compact” majority-Black districts or an additional district that meets the requirement of the federal Voting Rights Act and in which Black voters “otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.”

Assistant Attorney General Andrea Trento warned Thursday that election officials might struggle to implement changes that may result from challenges to Maryland’s new legislative map in time for the June 28 primary. “I have people at the board of elections, both at the State Board of Elections and all the local boards of elections who are losing sleep right now thinking about how they’re going to deal with whatever emerges from both this case, the federal case and some of the counties’ maps that are at issue right now,” Trento said at a virtual scheduling conference Thursday morning.

Republican state lawmakers announced legislation Thursday to require voter identification and signature verification, though those measures have repeatedly failed in the General Assembly. Measures to require voters to show a form of identification before casting their ballots and to require election officials to verify signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes were also introduced by Republican lawmakers in the 2021 legislative session, but those bills did not advance in the majority Democratic General Assembly.