Trump primetime speech sparks MD Democrats’ ire amid election fights

Top Maryland Democrats pushed back against President Donald Trump‘s Thursday evening address in which he continued to allege election fraud and are calling on Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox to join them.

“This is what losers do. They don’t solve problems. They slam the table and blame the rules,” Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, wrote Thursday in a post on the social media platform X, referring to “a debunked conspiracy theory.”

In his address to the nation, Trump, who has repeatedly pointed to election interference as the reason for his 2020 presidential reelection loss, alleged that foreign governments are in possession of “hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files”; ballot-counting systems are “exposed to hacking, manipulation and corruption”; China has attempted to interfere in American elections; “hundreds of thousands” of noncitizens and the deceased are listed as active among state’s voter rolls; and “tens of millions of ballots are floating aimlessly through the mail.”

There isn’t credible intelligence that the 2020 election was tampered with by foreign nations. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy organization based out of New York University, reports that there has been extensive research demonstrating that voter fraud and impersonation are incredibly rare for both mail-in and electronic voting.

The president called the election system “so broken and so vulnerable that no one could possibly defend it.”

But top officials in Maryland jumped to their keyboards to do just that. 

Starting his post on X with the phrase, “a couple of points,” Maryland Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis refuted multiple Trump claims.

“Mail-in voting is legal. MD voter registration processes follow federal & state laws. Cybersecurity for all of our systems is a top priority & constantly monitored for bad actors. Paper ballots can’t be hacked,” DeMarinis wrote. “Our elections are verified, secure & transparent.”

He was the plaintiff in a Justice Department lawsuit as it tried to demand full access to Maryland’s unredacted voter records. A judge tossed the suit last month, and the department has since threatened DeMarinis with criminal charges. 

The back-and-forth comes as Maryland deals with the fallout of nearly incorrect 500,000 mail-in ballots sent out. At the news, Trump referred to the ballots on social media as “fake.” DeMarinis responded on X that “NO Fake Mail-in ballots were distributed” and that the language the president used sought to “mislead, sow distrust and create misinformation.”

Preempting Thursday’s speech, House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk, D-Anne Arundel and Prince George’s, wrote on social media that “Maryland will continue to protect the freedom of every eligible voter to cast a ballot and have that ballot counted accurately.”

Senate President Bill Ferguson, D-Baltimore City, said Friday that Trump is making claims about elections “without evidence.”

“The facts are straightforward. Maryland’s elections are secure, our voter rolls are carefully maintained, and our election workers deserve our gratitude, not baseless attacks,” Ferguson wrote on X. “Marylanders are far more interested in lowering costs than relitigating conspiracy theories.”

While Maryland’s top Democrats are attempting to combat fear of voter fraud, state Democratic Party officials are turning their eyes to former Del. Dan Cox, who will again face Moore in the race for governor.

Cox, who lost that election handily, was endorsed by Trump during the 2022 election cycle and held a campaign event at the president’s famed Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He also arranged multiple buses for constituents to attend Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021, and called former Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor” as the U.S. Capitol building was stormed that afternoon.

In an interview on WBAL Radio on Thursday morning, Cox skirted answering whether he believes Trump won the 2020 presidential election, saying he thinks President Joe Biden “probably” won because he was certified to be the winner.

“I’m not an expert on elections, and I’ve gotten pegged with saying I’m a ‘denier.’ I’m actually a supporter of the data, and you’ll notice that I conceded — in my race, I conceded,” Cox said. “You’ll notice in the 2020 election — even though I got attacked because I questioned, like, Georgia — but at the end of the day, I called the president … President Biden. Why? Because, you know, he was the president.” 

Cox said he doesn’t believe in conspiracy theories regarding the 2020 election.

In 2021, he called for an audit of the past presidential election and in a 2022 interview with DC News Now said “yes” when asked if he believed the election had been stolen. A Friday statement from Maryland Democratic Party Chair Steuart Pittman called on Cox to “disavow” past such remarks and “apologize for the damage he and President Trump have inflicted on our Democracy.”

The Cox campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.