Maryland Democrats, led by Democrat Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), are in the midst of an “obvious power grab,” trying to put their congressional redistricting scheme referendum on the November ballot despite missing the deadline, Oversight Project’s Marshall Yates said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.
Yates said Oversight Project filed a lawsuit against Maryland to block the certification of the constitutional amendment they passed last week in the special session, which Democrat Gov. Wes Moore (D) called for.
“The special session came together August 3rd through the 4th to pass this amendment. But we argue that that amendment is legally insufficient under Maryland election laws because all constitutional ballot amendments have to be certified by the July 1st deadline,” Yates explained, putting it simply. “Essentially, they missed the deadline.”
“They passed a new law earlier in 2026 in their general assembly to certify the exact timelines that these amendments had to go through, and they set it at July 1st. But this power grab of Governor Moore decided these dates don’t matter — nothing matters in getting in my way of trying to put this amendment on the ballot. And the amendment is designed to set the stage to redraw Maryland’s congressional maps to draw out Andy Harris, the only lone Republican remaining in Maryland,” he said.
Oversight Project sued to block it and are trying to go through the process quickly, and Yates said in order for Democrats to win, they would “have to have the courts essentially say that that Maryland laws don’t matter.”
“They’re trying to implement COVID-era policies to wipe out all general election laws for their own political convenience. That is just something that we do not believe should stand,” he said, explaining that their argument is very simple: “Election laws matter and must be followed.”
Describing it as an “obvious power grab,” Yates said Democrats originally drafted the language, stating, “Let’s just add this to the ballot.”
“But the last minute, they figured out,” Yates said, proceeding to lay out what he believes their thinking was: “Oh no, there’s a deadline in the law that we had to have this thing done by July 1st. And we’re looking at, you know, it’s August 1st. What do we do? Well, let’s just write a little line in here that says, ‘Notwithstanding any other Maryland laws,’ which essentially wipes out all of Maryland’s election laws. Let’s use that to try to get on the ballot.”
Yates countered that with Republicans’ argument. “And we simply say that that is not the proper procedure or constitutionally valid to get this added to the ballot. You can’t just simply wave a magic wand, void all election laws because it’d be politically inconvenient to your timing.”
Yates added that Moore is simply trying to “satisfy his radical base in their thirst for grabbing political power.”
“We believe that he should have followed the Maryland election laws and its state statutes to do it, and he quite simply did not. So this is all a power grab, and I have a suspicion that they know that this is legally flawed and dubious, procedurally unsound, and they’re just hoping that no one notices or they can find a favorable court that will look upon it,” he said, noting that they will take this case all the way to the Supreme Court.
These deadlines, he continued, are designed to protect voters so that it doesn’t happen in such a way that “voters have no notice of what’s coming on the ballot,” but instead “they can they can have sufficient notice. And that is grounded in the constitutional principles of due process, and that’s the reason these deadlines exist.”
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