Does secretary still dismiss voter fraud in Connecticut?

According to Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, Connecticut has too little voter fraud to worry about. But she doesn’t really know, because until last week few people had ever seriously looked. Merrill’s assurances have been just part of the Democratic Party’s campaign to facilitate illegal immigration, proletarianize the country, and increase dependence on government.

But last week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers looked into the extraordinary level of absentee voting in Bridgeport’s recent Democratic mayoral primary election, in which the challenger, state Sen. Marilyn Moore, won on the voting machines but was defeated as Mayor Joe Ganim overwhelmingly carried the absentee ballots.

The Hearst investigation found that fraud was extensive among its limited sample of voters. Ineligible people — including people who were not registered to vote, people who were not Democrats, and felons and parolees — received and cast absentee votes. Elderly people were coerced or pressured to complete absentee ballots for the mayor by Ganim supporters who came to their homes. Absentee ballots were sent to people who did not request them. Recordkeeping by Bridgeport election officials is sloppy, maintaining incorrect birth dates for some voters and mistaken receipt dates for absentee ballots.

Merrill has forwarded the Hearst report to the state Elections Enforcement Commission and asked it to investigate because her office lacks the commission’s powers. But the secretary should be chastened by what already has come out, for she has been advocating legislation to deny public access to voter registration data.

With her legislation Merrill claims to be supporting individual privacy. But voters are not entirely private citizens, for they hold the most basic public office — elector — an office established by the state Constitution. Nobody has to become an elector. You volunteer, and election fraud cannot be detected by the public or news organizations unless the names, addresses, and birth dates of electors are as public as they long have been in Connecticut.

Since, as her legislation signifies, the secretary denies the possibility of voter fraud, the law should not hinder the media and public in detecting it as the Hearst papers have just done.

Piling on Purdue Pharma

If there was an award for piling on, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong would be a leading contender. Practically every day he announces a lawsuit his office is joining to challenge some policy of the Trump administration.

Those policies may be questionable but it is also questionable how much Tong’s office is really doing with the lawsuits beyond providing proforma endorsements that get publicity for him.

Tong has worked up his greatest indignation for the lawsuit he has joined with many states against Stamfordbased Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, to which many people have gotten addicted, many of them dying from their addiction.

But the country’s worsening addiction problem long preceded OxyContin, and nobody could have gotten addicted to it if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration hadn’t approved it 24 years ago and if thousands of doctors had not prescribed it too heavily to their patients.

Of course suing those who uncontrolled the drug would be a tougher and fairer fight for any attorney general who enjoys piling on.