Coronavirus concerns and a shortage of poll workers has the Maryland Board of Elections seeking a drastic reduction in the number of places to vote in November.
Gov. Larry Hogan has not yet said whether he will grant the board's request, delivered Friday, for permission to open just 282 voting centers this fall — or one-seventh the usual 1,600, in the reliably blue state. Last month, the Republican governor had directed officials to keep every in-person polling location open on Election Day, while also mailing absentee ballot applications to every voter.
What Hogan termed his plan for a "normal" election immediately raised concerns from Democrats, local election officials and good-government groups who said the arrangements would be too expensive and difficult to execute.
The 282 voting centers would allow Marylanders to cast their ballot early or on Election Day at any location in their county, rather than at a specific precinct based on their residential address. These voting centers would be located at every public high school in the state, along with other locations.
After an array of problems with the state's June primary, which was conducted mostly by mail, Hogan decided to go with a more traditional election in the fall. But local election administrators are struggling to recruit enough people to work the polls during the eight-day early voting period and on Election Day.
Local officials say they are more than 14,000 workers short of what's required under Hogan's plan. Two dozen facilities that usually serve as voting sites have also cited the public health crisis in refusing to host voting this fall.
While Hogan has not yet weighed in on this latest proposal, the state board of elections hopes he will see it as a good compromise that will provide enough in-person polling locations for voters while not overwhelming local election administrators.
In a letter to the elections board last week, Hogan reprimanded local officials who had suggested consolidating polling locations due to staff shortages, saying these closures would amount to statewide voter suppression. He also cited the Voting Rights Act and quoted from former President Barack Obama's eulogy for Rep. John Lewis.
The governor ordered the state board of elections to list the number of polling locations in each county that are able to be operational and outline how it plans to conduct the November election.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.