Absentee Ballots
More than 32,000 Connecticut voters already have applied for absentee ballots for the November general election just one week after applications went out to millions of households across the state.
More than 32,000 Connecticut voters already have applied for absentee ballots for the November general election just one week after applications went out to millions of households across the state.
Any voter will be able to cast an absentee ballot this fall due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the immediate return of thousands of applications signals elections officials will be flooded with a record-annihilating number of mail-in and drop-off ballots in the runup to the Nov. 3 contest.
Absentee ballot applications went out early last week to every registered voter in the state — more than 2 million total — as Secretary of the State Denise Merrill and local elections offices aim to avoid crowded Election Day polling places when the state will still be combating the spread of COVID-19.
“The nature of COVID-19 as a contagious virus that passes through direct person-to-person contact necessitated expanding access to absentee ballots so no voter had to choose between their health and their right to vote,” Merrill said in announcing more than $2.3 million in grants to support towns’ absentee efforts. “Although ensuring that every voter will be able to participate in our democracy in the face of a global pandemic will be incredibly difficult, my office is able to leverage federal grant money to ensure that every town is able to provide for every one of their voters.”
As of Tuesday, elections offices had processed 32,205 absentee ballot applications from more than 70% of Connecticut’s 169 towns.
More than half of those applications came from Democrats, who make up about 37% of all voters, and unaffiliated voters submitted about one third of the applications processed so far, according to state data. Only about 12% of the applications processed so far were submitted by Republican voters, who make up about 21% of the state’s electorate.
More than 2,700 Norwalk voters have submitted applications so far, the most of any town in the first week since applications became available, according to the data. Hamden and Greenwich have both processed more than 1,400 applications each and Cheshire, Shelton, Ridgefield and Guilford all have processed more than 1,000 applications each so far.
Elections officials predict two-thirds of all the votes cast in November will be absentee ballots and total voter turnout could reach 80%.
During the Aug. 11 primary, almost 227,000 voters cast absentee ballots — more than triple the roughly 72,000 in-person votes cast that day. Elections officials expect that lopsided split to continue in November at a much larger scale, due to the large increase in total voters who participate in presidential elections every four years.
New voter registrations this summer also are almost 80% higher than the number of new voters added during the same time period in 2016, further indicating even more votes will be cast in this fall’s historic and unusual pandemic-time election.