Town receives record number of ballot requests

GREENWICH — With a month until Election Day, the town of Greenwich has already received a record number of requests for absentee ballots with more than double the number in 2016, officials said.

The first batch of about 9,000 absentee ballots were put in the mail on Friday, Town Clerk Carmella Budkins said, and residents should receive them in the coming days.

“We have trays of ballots ready to be mailed out, and we have more applications coming in,” Budkins said Friday morning. “We are putting more together as we speak.”

By Saturday, the number of requests for absentee ballots was up to 10,554 in Greenwich, according to Budkins. The breakdown was 4,229 requests from Democrats, 3,507 from unaffiliated voters, 2,644 from

Republicans and 174 from other voters, she said.

High turnout is expected for the election, which locally includes the race for president, U.S. Congress, state senator and all three of Greenwich’s seats in the state House.

This is most absentee ballots that have ever been requested and issued in Greenwich’s history, and the number is growing, said Fred DeCaro III, the town’s Republican registrar of voters.

Voters can apply for absentee ballots up to and including Nov. 2, Democratic Registrar of Voters Mary Hegarty said.

DeCaro added, “It’s selfevident that is far larger than anything anyone has ever seen.”

For the presidential race in 2016, Greenwich issued about 5,000 absentee ballots, Budkins said, and the town has already received double that number. In last year’s municipal election, 1,389 absentee ballots were sent out, she said.

The state legislature and Gov. Ned Lamont are allowing access to absentee ballots for all voters in the Nov. 3 election because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ballot applications have been coming in since September, at the rate of more than a thousand per week — and it has not dropped off, Budkins said.

Hegarty said that many voters may have sent in their absentee ballot requests early and “not push up against” the deadline to get the ballot and return it.

The Town Clerk’s Department collects the returned ballots and stores them unopened until Election Day in the town vault, Budkins said. They will be given to the Registrars of Voters Department on Election Day for counting, she said.

With the volume of applications and resulting workload, the Town Clerk’s Department received authorization to turn their part-time employee into a full-time employee through the election and to add an extra worker to come in three days a week, Budkins said

There are now a total of five employees working on receiving the applications and getting the ballots out, she said.

“The staff has been working until 6 o’clock at night and on Saturdays to get these out while trying to keep up with our regular work,” Budkins said. “We’re busy. To process 9,000 applications and then stuff all those ballots into envelopes takes a lot of time. And you have to be so careful because we have all the different voting districts divided up by the state representative races so all the ballots are not the same and you have to make sure the right ballot goes to the right voter.”

The Registrars of Voters are expected to have 50 poll workers counting absentee ballots on Election Day. To make sure there is enough space to do the work and safely socially distance, the counting will take place at Greenwich High School.

On the Friday and Monday before Election Day, the registrars will be able to do preprocessing work to get the ballots ready to be counted by opening the outer envelopes and verifying the legitimacy of the inner envelope. No actual counting can be done until Nov. 3, when the inner envelopes are opened.

Voters can place their applications for an absentee ballots and then their completed ballots in the town’s two secure drop boxes, which are located in the Town Hall parking lot and in the lobby of the police station. Or they can be returned through the mail.

The drop boxes are checked and emptied every day, Budkins said.

On Friday, Gabe Rosenberg, communications director for Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, said that Greenwich is getting two new drop boxes, which are en route to the town. The locations for the new drop boxes was not announced.

If voters who applied do not receive their absentee ballot by the end of the week, Budkins said they should call her office and they will assist.

“Each ballot is dated when it was sent out,” she said. “If people have not gotten their ballots they should not hesitate to call us because they should put their ballots in the mail as soon as they can or bring them to our drop boxes. Don’t wait.”

DeCaro and Hegarty will hold a Zoom discussion with the public at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 6, on absentee ballots and in-person voting. They will discuss rules and procedures and answer questions about safety, voting options and deadlines. They will also explain how to properly fill out the absentee ballots and return it using the two envelopes.

The discuss is held in partnership with Greenwich Reform Synagogue. For more information, call 203-629-0018 or send an email to info@GRS.org.