What Happened
AP reported that President Trump falsely accused Maryland officials, including Gov. Wes Moore, of illegally sending hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots to voters to help Democrats.
The actual issue, according to the Maryland State Board of Elections and AP's fact check, was a vendor error: some voters received a primary ballot for the wrong party ahead of Maryland's June gubernatorial primary. Officials said affected voters would receive replacement ballots, any original ballots already returned would be voided, and voters who had not returned the incorrect ballot should destroy it.
AP also noted the built-in safeguard that matters here: unique identifiers on ballot envelopes are used to make sure each voter can vote only once. Maryland also has separate Democratic and Republican primaries, so the error was not the partisan ballot-stuffing machine described in the post.
Why This Matters
Election administration makes mistakes because election administration is done by humans, vendors, printers, envelopes and databases, which is to say by the least glamorous machinery in democracy. The serious response is to identify the mistake, correct the affected ballots, void the bad ones and explain the safeguards.
The unserious response is to grab a clerical error, add a giant number, accuse state officials of corruption and demand federal investigation before the facts have put on their shoes.
The Dumb Part With The Conspiracy Megaphone
The dumb part is the inflation. A ballot sent with the wrong primary because of a vendor problem is not automatically an "illegal" ballot conspiracy. It is a printing-and-mailing failure with a documented correction process.
There is plenty to criticize when election mailings go wrong. But turning the correction process itself into proof of a plot is how a paperwork mistake becomes a fog machine for people who already brought their own siren.
The Bottom Line
AP's fact check is blunt: the claim was false. Maryland had a ballot vendor error, officials said replacement ballots would go out and originals would be voided, and the one-person-one-vote safeguards still exist. That is less cinematic than the conspiracy version, which is usually how reality gets its job done.
Sources
AP Fact Focus: Trump falsely accuses Maryland of sending illegal mail-in ballots
Maryland State Board of Elections: Replacement mail-in ballot information