Maryland Republicans filed a lawsuit late Thursday seeking to block a redistricting constitutional amendment from appearing on the November ballot, arguing Democratic leaders in Annapolis violated state election law when they rushed the measure through this week’s special legislative session.
The suit, Howell v. Maryland State Board of Elections, was filed in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court by all seven members of the Maryland Freedom Caucus, Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey, Senate Minority Whip Justin Ready, and Mike Howell, president of the conservative Oversight Project. Two of the plaintiffs represent Southern Maryland directly: Del. Matt Morgan of St. Mary’s County, who chairs the Freedom Caucus, and Del. Mark Fisher of Calvert County. The complaint names the State Board of Elections, Gov. Wes Moore, Attorney General Anthony Brown, State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis and Secretary of State Susan Lee as defendants.
The lawsuit centers on a claim that state law requires the Secretary of State to certify ballot language by July 1 ahead of a general election and provide a 15-day public comment period, deadlines the redistricting amendment missed because it wasn’t passed until this week’s August special session. According to the complaint, lawmakers attempted to work around those missed deadlines by inserting a “notwithstanding any other provision of law” clause into House Bill 2100, and plaintiffs argue that clause is itself unconstitutional and was added without adequate public notice. The complaint also argues the ballot question’s language fails to meet a separate state law requirement that such questions be written in plain language voters can understand.
“Annapolis Democrats spent taxpayer dollars on a special session for one reason: To rewrite the Maryland Constitution and eliminate the last remaining Republican congressional seat,” Morgan said in a news release announcing the suit. “Like a banana republic, they suspended the rules, ignored statutory deadlines, and treated the Constitution as an obstacle to be removed.” Morgan added Friday that the process had denied Marylanders a fair chance to weigh in. “They hurt due process,” he said. “They blatantly missed the dates, and then they tried to cover it up with some legal language.”
Democratic leaders have said they relied on legal guidance in crafting the bill’s language. Moore said this week that the administration consulted closely with the Attorney General’s office as well as outside constitutional experts in both Maryland and federal law to make sure the process would hold up. Republicans have separately criticized the underlying policy, framing the special session as an effort to eliminate the seat held by Rep. Andy Harris, the state’s only Republican member of Congress and chairman of the U.S. House Freedom Caucus.
Legal experts have expressed skepticism that the lawsuit will succeed. Mark Graber, a constitutional law professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, said before the suit was filed that Maryland’s ballot-timing rules differ meaningfully from Virginia’s, where a court invalidated a similar redistricting ballot question over public-notice violations. Graber said Maryland lawmakers appear to have followed the state’s typical constitutional amendment process and predicted a court would be unlikely to find that a roughly three-month window before the election was legally insufficient. He said he expects any legal challenge to fail regardless of the underlying policy dispute.
The case echoes a redistricting lawsuit from four years earlier. In 2021, Del. Kathy Szeliga, now the Freedom Caucus’s vice chair and a plaintiff in this suit, led a successful challenge to Maryland’s congressional map after the 2020 census. An Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge struck down that map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, forcing lawmakers to redraw it into the more competitive map currently in place. Szeliga invoked that precedent in this week’s filing. “Four years ago, I was the lead plaintiff when Judge Lynne Battaglia struck down the Democrats’ extreme partisan gerrymander,” Szeliga said. “Today, the Maryland Freedom Caucus is once again leading the fight to stop them from changing the rules midstream.”
Even if Republicans lose this challenge, the underlying redistricting fight is unlikely to end soon. Joseph Dietrich, an assistant professor of political science at Towson University, said he expects Republicans to challenge the effort at multiple stages, including the ballot question itself and any new congressional map Democrats draw afterward. He said he believes Democrats will ultimately move forward with a new map regardless of the November outcome, given how much political capital they have already spent on the special session. Dietrich was less certain the effort would actually cost Harris his seat, noting his enduring popularity on the Eastern Shore even in a map that stretched his district toward more Democratic-leaning areas near Annapolis.
