"The procedural aspects of this bill's passage are odious enough. Before they voted, Democratic lawmakers stripped the bill of provisions that would have permitted Republicans an equal role in deciding where to place the early-polling stations and that would have required that the stations' locations be geographically central. The conference committee that wrote the bill was composed of six Democrats and zero Republicans.

The locations of many of the polling stations for early voting seem designed to mine Democratic votes, which tend to be in more heavily populated areas. In Howard County, early-voting stations were placed in heavily Democratic areas in an apparent effort to weaken the reelection prospects of freshman state Sen. Sandra B. Schrader, probably the most imperiled of Maryland's 14 Republican state senators."