Connecticut’s voting laws among the most restrictive

Democrat lawmakers weighing a number of bills to expand access

Republicans in Georgia recently passed sweeping new restrictions on voting, including provisions that make it harder to get an absentee ballot and cap the number of early voting days at 19.

That’s 19 more days than Connecticut, which offers zero days of in-person early voting.

And while Georgia’s governor and its legislature erected new barriers to absentee voting, it is still easier to obtain a mail-in ballot there than it is in Connecticut.

Yet Georgia, a state with a long history of curtailing ballot access to Black voters, is embracing policies that decrease voter turnout by adding restrictions and complications to the voting process.

Connecticut, a state with some of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation, is poised to move in the opposite direction: Democrats in the General Assembly are considering a number of bills that would expand access and make voting easier.

“That’s the great irony of all this,” said Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. “We’re trying to move in a direction they’re already cutting back from. It’s a bizarre situation.”

A push to lift restrictions

In addition to no early in-person voting, Connecticut also severely restricts access to absentee ballots.

Some states automatically mail absentee ballots — a practice not permitted in Connecticut until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily upended many of the state’s longstanding rules.

Connecticut is also one of 19 states where felons lose their voting rights during incarceration and while on parole. (Those rights are not restored until after all fines are paid.)

Merrill and other Democrats in the legislature have been trying to lift many of those restrictions for years but have been largely unsuccessful.

They did succeed in introducing one change: In 2012, the legislature

passed a measure that allows residents to register and vote on the day of the election. The measure took 25 years to pass.

In recent years, voting laws have become politically divisive. Republicans in Connecticut and around the nation have claimed — without proof — that restrictions on voting are needed to curtail fraud. Those assertions were fed by former President Donald Trump and his supporters, who alleged falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.

“The big lie that fraud and theft cost Donald Trump the election is believed by a lot of people,” said Bilal Sekou, a professor of political science at the University of Hartford and a member of the national governing board of Common Cause, a non-partisan advocacy group that promotes democracy.

Sen. Rob Sampson, the ranking Republican on the legislative committee overseeing election law, said he is concerned with the “integrity” of elections above all else.

“The issue is sometimes the devil is in the details,” Sampson, who is from Wolcott, said during a recent debate on several of the election-related bills. “We are all in favor of allowing people to vote and expanding access to voting. I can’t say it enough times.”

But, Sampson added, “the fact of the matter is, we have an obligation to protect the integrity of that vote. ... If you undermine the integrity of the election, then every other lawful voter’s vote is diminished.” He provided no examples of voter malfeasance.

Sampson and other Republicans have all voted against the election reform bills under consideration this year.

‘No excuse’ absentee ballots, other changes

Here are the voting bills under consideration this year:

Senate Bill 5, which would allow people on parole to vote, regardless of whether they still have outstanding fines. It would also expand to other state agencies the so-called “motor voter” law that permits voters to register at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Senate Bill 820, which would establish a state voting rights act. The measure, which was drafted by Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, in consultation with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, seeks to prevent voter suppression and intimidation and gives the state attorney general new enforcement authority.

House Joint Resolution 58, which would allow for “no-excuse” absentee ballots. Under current law, people seeking mail-in ballots must provide a reason why they cannot be at the polls on Election Day. (Valid excuses for obtaining a mail-in ballot include military deployment, traveling out of town and illness.)

House Joint Resolution 59, which would allow for early voting. Connecticut is one of just seven states that does not allow citizens to vote in-person before Election Day. (One of those states, Delaware, announced it will begin offering that option in 2022.)

Both of those proposals require amending the state constitution, which is, by design, a multistep process. If the bill allowing for no-excuse absentee ballots passed both chambers of the General Assembly by a three-fourths vote, it would be placed on the November 2022 statewide ballot for consideration by Connecticut voters. If it passed by a lesser margin, it would need to be voted on again by the legislature in 2022 or 2023, and would come before voters in November 2024.

The measure allowing for early voting has already cleared both chambers, although not by a three-fourths vote. So it needs to be approved by a simple majority this year to earn a spot on the November 2022 ballot.

Even after the constitution is amended, lawmakers will have to work out the specifics of both proposals. States vary in the number of days they permit early voting, from four days to 45, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Difference between Connecticut, Georgia

“It is easier to vote by absentee ballot in Georgia than it is in Connecticut,” Sekou said. “That might strike a lot of people as odd.”

The Civil Rights movement, and efforts by the Justice Department to crack down on the Jim Crowera restrictions, are part of the reason why Southern states such as Georgia have less restrictive laws governing absentee ballots and early voting, Sekou said.

“Early on there were lots of restrictions in place to prevent most people in the United States from voting,” he said. “The history of voting rights is really the history of social movements and give people an opportunity to fully participate in the political system.”

Georgia’s history is different from Connecticut’s, Sekou said. “Those states had a long history of voter suppression. Lawsuits and pressure from the Justice Department [required] them to extend the franchise . ... That struggle for voting rights didn’t take place in Connecticut. We’re comparing apples to oranges.”

He added: “Fixing these quirks in our election laws should be a priority in our state if we want everyone whose eligible to vote to have the opportunity to vote and to have the right to vote.”