Governor Results Take Too Long In This State

Once again, Connecticut voters went to bed on Election Night not knowing who their next governor would be. That was partly because this was such a close race. It was also partly because of voting problems in New Haven. (Why is it always one city or another that holds up Connecticut’s elections?)

But it’s largely because election results take far too long in Connecticut in this electronic age.

Florida had declared a winner in its tight governor’s race by 11:45 p.m. Tuesday, with 99 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press. Not even half of Connecticut’s precincts had reported results in the governor’s race by then, the AP said. A winner was nowhere in sight. That is, sadly, not unusual.

In 2010, Connecticut’s final tally in another close governor’s race took three days, partly because of Bridgeport’s vote-count delay and other problems.

In 2014, Connecticut’s lumbering machine got up to a brisker walk, despite major voting problems in Hartford. But the results of the governor’s race still weren’t known by early the next morning. By then, the world knew the results of close races in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin.

In this year’s primary election on Aug. 14, Nathaniel Rakich at the political blog fivethirtyeight.com wrote just before 10 p.m., “There are still a handful of races left to be called.” Guess which state was among them?

Why Is Connecticut So Slow?

How fast election results get reported in this state is entirely up to each town’s election officials.

There are an awful lot of election officials in this state — 340 registrars across the state, according to Sue W. Larsen, president of the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut and South Windsor’s Democratic registrar.

Isn’t that a few too many?

Some states, like Florida, have just one appointed professional per county. But Connecticut has at least two and sometimes three elected registrars — per town and city.

A quirk in state law requires that every municipality have one Democratic and one Republican registrar — and also that the two top vote-getters win seats. So if a top vote-getter is from a minor party, then that town or city must welcome a third registrar.

That’s how Westbrook (population 6,956) and New Canaan (20,376) ended up with three registrars.

Strapped towns and cities have to pay for all these election officials and their staffs.

In theory, registrars from different parties serve as a check on each other. In practice, it doesn’t always work that way. Registrars have been known to stop speaking to each other and even to engage in fisticuffs.

Hartford became the first municipality in Connecticut to have three registrars when, in 2009, a Working Families Party member became the second-highest vote-getter. Six years later, the city council said it would remove all three registrars because of polling irregularities in 2014. (So much for registrars overseeing each other.) A judge later said the council couldn’t fire the elected officials.

To have so many registrars is absurd. No municipality needs three, or even two.

It makes sense, would save a lot of money and might even speed things up for Connecticut to have one professional nonpartisan registrar per town.

Arduous Process

Another reason it takes so long to learn the results in Connecticut races is that pages of results must be transcribed and data-entered to the state — by law, by midnight Tuesday.

Cities with more voting precincts naturally take longer to enter their data. The process for entering all this data is arduous, and the system has been known to crash.

Far larger states, however, with far bigger cities have figured out how to get their election results soon after polls close. Why, oh why, can’t Connecticut?