Maryland

Every legislative district elects one senator and three delegates — but 18 of the 47 districts split into lettered subdistricts (1A, 1B, 1C) electing one or two each. Single-winner models fail on vote-for-up-to-three contests, and joins on the district number collide the Senate's District 12 with the House's 12A and 12B.

Appellate judges face yes/no retention questions with no opponent. Circuit judges run contested for fifteen-year terms — and file in both parties' primaries at once, so the same candidate appears twice with different vote totals. Orphans' Court elects three per county, except Harford, Howard, and Montgomery, where it doesn't exist as an elected bench.

Mail ballots may be processed early but not tabulated before election-day polls open, postmarked ballots arrive for ten days, and certification lands a month out. Election-night totals undercount massively and drift blue as the mail canvass runs. Freezing results at E+1 publishes wrong margins — and 2026 is the first gubernatorial cycle run start-to-finish under this regime.

The state's second-largest jurisdiction sits in no county — an independent city with its own election board since 1851, a separate FIPS code from Baltimore County, and city elections that ride the presidential cycle. Fuzzy-matching "Baltimore" merges two different governments, and mayor and council contests appear only in presidential-year feeds.

Twenty systems elect their boards, four are hybrids of elected and appointed seats — Baltimore City's is mayor-appointed plus two elected at-large — and the mix is set statute-by-statute, county-by-county. Wicomico elects by council district for the first time in 2026. A national template invents seats that don't exist and misses ones that do.

Only registered Democrats and Republicans vote party primaries — but nonpartisan contests like school boards sit on the same primary ballot, so unaffiliated voters get a ballot with only those races. Turnout denominators split by contest type. And the primary date itself moves: fourth Tuesday in June this cycle, April or May in presidential years, July in 2022 by court order.

The 2022 congressional map was struck as a partisan gerrymander and redrawn inside a week; this February a mid-decade Democratic redraw passed the House and died in the Senate. Now Question 3 on the November ballot would hand congressional-map review to the state Supreme Court. The geography held — but the rules governing it are on the ballot itself.

Incorporated municipalities run their own elections under their own charters — scattered from February to December, heaviest in May, administered by town clerks, mostly absent from state feeds. Takoma Park votes ranked-choice, at sixteen, including noncitizen residents — a voter universe disjoint from the state file, in a format plurality schemas can't hold.