The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Voters use drop boxes, not mail
Absentees less than forecast
Stephanie Johnson took a walk over to town hall on the green in Guilford late last week with her husband, Phil, and their black Labrador retriever. She posed for him to shoot a photo as she dropped her absentee ballot into the town’s white box next to the bicycle rack.
“I was going to vote in person,” she said, but as a teacher at a private school, she doesn’t have Election Day off. Besides, COVID-19 cases are on the rise.
“With life starting to become that much more unpredictable ... I just said let me take this one more thing off my plate,” Johnson said. “I decided that would be my birthday present to myself.”
She never even considered mailing her ballot — nor did Phil Johnson, chairman of the town planning and zoning commission, who dropped his off the day after it arrived at the start of the month.
It was my birthday, too, and I celebrated by noticing a constant stream of people depositing ballots in the town box, and by crunching statewide voting numbers (yeah, and kayaking in Guilford Harbor
at sunset).
Here’s the upshot: By my informal poll of town clerks, two-thirds of all the filled-out absentee ballots arriving at municipal offices are coming by the stateissued drop-off boxes, not by the U.S. Postal Service — even though the postage is paid by the state.
“The public is worried about all kinds of things but among them, the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver their ballot,” Secretary of the State Denise Merrill told me Friday. “They’re not incorrect. I think there is a problem with the Postal Service. ... With all the uncertainty this year, this was bound to happen.”
Not many through the mail
Because voters are skittish about the mail — rightly or wrongly — and because absentee ballots are coming in at lower volumes than we expected, pressure on the Postal Service over the next week will be far less than we had thought.
For the whole onemonth cycle, we may see at most 225,000 voted ballots mailed to town clerks. That’s less than a rounding error in the roughly 120 million pieces of mail the Postal Service delivers in Connecticut every month.
In the final week, with all ballots due in town and city halls by Election Day, we can expect to see even more coming in by dropoff and fewer by mail. Even people who have faith in the Postal Service won’t want to entrust their place in history in the deadline days to an agency headed by a U.S. Postmaster General, appointed by President Donald Trump, whose policies slowed the mail this past summer.
A Hearst CTInsider test published Oct 7 based on 400 local letters showed that most arrived within a few days but some took
much longer.
Overall, based on the numbers so far, we can expect to see in the range of 650,000 absentee ballots cast by Connecticut voters in this election. It could go higher if we see a lastminute rush, but the numbers have been steady through October, so that seems unlikely.
That means lines at the polls could be significant in some places despite Connecticut having five times as many absentee ballots as the state has ever seen.
Less than the 1 million projected
Even a total of 650,000 absentees would be five times larger than the absentee ballot total of 129,500 in the 2016 presidential election, because this year, of course, onetime coronavirus rules let anyone vote by absentee.
But it would be far less than the 1.1 million voters the state was prepared to see vote absentee. Many of us expected Connecticut to cross that 1 million threshold. We believe 1.8 million Connecticut citizens will vote by Nov. 3, and 59 percent of ballots were absentee in the Aug. 11 primaries — when COVID-19 was far less prevalent.
Among the several town clerks I asked, in-person drop-offs ranged from about half to 80 percent of the arriving ballots. In Fairfield, for example, Town Clerk Betsy Browne said her office collects about two full, large trays a day from the town’s two drop-off boxes, and about one and one-quarter trays come in through the mail.
“We come in on the weekend and empty it too,” Browne said.
In Woodbridge, Town Clerk Stephanie Ciarlegio said at least two-thirds were coming in via that town’s single box.
In Windsor, Town Clerk Anna Posniak said earlier this month that she and her staff were hauling in 100 to 150 dropped off
ballots four times a day — and received about the same number, 100 to 150, once a day through the mail.
“Originally I thought, ‘Well, voters aren’t going to use these boxes,’” Posniak, president of the Connecticut Town Clerks Association, said.
Now, she said, “There’s like traffic jams in our town all the time,” to reach the boxes. “The towns installed all of our boxes in well lit areas near town halls and there’s cameras fixed on them.”
I’m not aware of any reported vandalism of the boxes in Connecticut, but one town clerk told me a video captured images of a person shaking one of the boxes.
The numbers so far
Here’s how the numbers are shaping up, as of the secretary of the state’s most recent report late Friday. Town clerks had mailed out a total of 659,894 absentee ballots, representing 29 percent of all registered voters. They received back 455,861, which means 20 percent of all registered voters have already cast ballots.
Requests for absentee ballots have been coming in at a rate of about 50,000 to 60,000 a week since Oct. 2, when towns and cities mailed out those that were requested in September. And the requests are slowing.
As for incoming ballots, those are fairly steady. In exactly three weeks of absentee balloting, we’ve seen 155,000 come back the first week; 163,000 the second week; and 137,000 in the third week.
We’d have to see 245,000 in the last 11 days to break the 700,000 mark. That’s not likely because that many ballots are not in voters’ hands yet. Moreover, many thousands of voters have requested absentee ballots with the intention of using them only if an emergency prevents them from voting in-person.
That’s perfectly legal, and highly recommended. If you didn’t get yourself an absentee ballot and you’re quarantined on Nov. 3, or the lines are too long, or something else comes up, you will not vote in one of the most important presidential elections of your lifetime.
Democrats continue to vote by absentee in far higher numbers than Republicans. Through Friday, 233,214, or 28 percent of registered Dems, had already voted. Among registered Republicans, 67,707, or 14 percent, dropped off of mailed in ballots. And among unaffiliated and minor party members, 148,563, or 16 percent, cast ballots that town clerks had received.
Requests by those three groups were pretty much proportional, meaning we will see Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3-to-1 or more in the absentee count — and it’s conceivable Trump could win the in-person vote in Connecticut.
Popular boxes, tired clerks
Merrill’s office ordered the boxes, at about $ 2,000
apiece for a total of $ 500,000, and sent the towns $ 1.45 million to handle the ballots, using federal coronavirus money.
“The ballot boxes are giving people access to the vote. And that’s what we want,” said Merrill, who documented mail sorting machines dismantled at the Hartford post office over the summer. “It’s all about options, really.”
But all of this adds to the pressure on the town clerks. Stamford, the largest absentee ballot city in the state, by far, with 24,552 ballots sent to residents as of Friday and 16,123 received back in city hall from voters, is among about two dozen cities and towns with four drop-off boxes.
That means many police escorts to pick up ballots, Town and City Clerk Lyda Ruijter said — and it will mean a coordinated effort at the 8 p.m. deadline on Nov. 3.
“How many of my staff can go out at 8 o’clock at night?” she asked. “There is absolutely no consideration of what it takes.”
Ruijter said she had help from the Postal Service in the August primaries to
route ballots more directly, not through White Plains. That may not happen for this election. She has tried to publicize the city’s four drop-off boxes but didn’t have a marketing budget.
As I said in an Oct. 17 column, Merrill, her staff and the municipal clerks and registrars are building a system to last for years, not just for this one emergency. That will take a constitutional amendment on absentee balloting, which Merrill will propose in 2021.
And, said Browne, the Fairfield town clerk, who’s putting in 12-hour days, “They need to change the process. ... It’s very laborintensive.”
For voters such as the Johnsons and Florence Sordi, a retired banker in Guilford, there’s no going back. And that means drop-off, not balloting by mail.
“It’s okay mailing cards and stuff like that,” Sordi told me Thursday, weeks after she dropped off her ballot on the day she received it. “But something as important as a ballot, you never know.”