Statement by the Montgomery County Board of Elections on Maintaining Our Voter Rolls

For Immediate Release: Monday, January 12, 2026

We will have more to say through counsel and official filings in response to the recent Republican National Committee lawsuit against the State and the county Boards of Election, but we would like to say a few things now about how we maintain our voter rolls. 

First, everyone on our Board and our staff always wants our voter rolls to be as accurate as possible, and we not only follow both federal law and state law, but we also have taken several proactive list maintenance actions.  For example, we have emailed hundreds of thousands of voters (everyone who has shared their email address with us) to encourage them to update their voter registrations long before voting begins. Additionally, through our Voter Outreach program, our staff attends countless events to educate voters on registering to vote and provide voter outreach education on maintaining updated registration for voters, including extensive outreach to high school students.

Second, the allegation that our county’s December 2024 voter registration numbers are “impossibly high” in that they exceed our estimated citizen voting age population uses some fuzzy math.  It’s comparing apples to oranges to compare our December 2024 voter registration numbers with 5-year average census citizen voting-age population estimates from 2019-2023. By definition, citizen voting-age population estimates leave out the thousands of young people who can register at age 16 or 17 in Maryland but can only vote at age 18, and comparing two different time periods does not take into account other factors that increased voter registration between the time period for which population was measured and the two years later that voter registration was measured.  Montgomery County had more than 30,000 more active registered voters in December 2024 than it did on January 1, 2023, which the Census describes as the reference date for its 2019-2023 citizen voting-age population estimates.

And we’re required by law to make individual decisions about whether someone should be removed from the voter rolls. We cannot remove people from the voter rolls because of circumstantial conclusions or group statistics, especially dubious statistics. 

Third, Maryland participates in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a non-profit, nonpartisan multi-state partnership of state election officials – owned, managed and funded by the participating states – that uses secure data-matching to improve the accuracy of state voter registration systems. That access to ERIC supports our ability to provide and obtain more useful data to support list maintenance activities across state lines. While we benefit from the voter registration data shared among the 25 states and the District of Columbia that are currently members, if more states were to join or rejoin ERIC, that would provide more useful data to support those list maintenance activities. If we do not receive notice through ERIC that a voter has relocated to another state, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (also known as the NVRA) mandates a process to follow for removing that voter from our rolls. This process involves sending election mail, handling undeliverable mail, issuing confirmation notices, and waiting through the next two consecutive federal general elections before cancelling the registration of a voter who has moved out of state and is no longer participating in Maryland's elections.

Finally, our staff diligently removes deceased voters from our voter rolls on a daily basis. We receive pertinent data through the State Board of Elections from the Maryland Department of Health and ERIC, and directly from family members of deceased voters or from other voters.  

We hope this information helps to give Montgomery County residents a more complete and accurate picture of how we maintain our voter rolls.

Your Voice, Your Vote 2026!

Media Contact: Gilberto Zelaya  240-777-8625