How exactly does absentee voting work?

NORWALK — A little less than a week after the ballots hit mailboxes, a masked Norwalk Town Clerk Rick McQuaid said staff was catching up on all the absentee ballot applications still coming in in the “war room” — what he calls a conference room on the ground floor of City Hall.

There, some of the city’s part-time election workers process absentee ballot applications at long tables covered in stacks and stacks of election material. The city has already received 14,000 applications for absentee ballots. McQuaid predicts they will receive about 7,000 more absentee ballot applications in the coming weeks, meaning 21,000 of Norwalk’s 56,000 registered voters will have voted by mail come Election Day.

Down the hall, the Registrar of Voters is trying to keep up with new registrations — 3,000 have come in in the last few months — and sending absentee ballot applications to those newly registered voter who didn’t get one from the state. “We have 130 from yesterday,” said Democratic Registrar of Voters Stuart Wells on Thursday. “It’s a continuous process.”

During the 2016 presidential election, Norwalk processed about 3,000 absentee ballot applications. This year, they’re processing 3,000 to 4,000 a day. The Secretary of State’s Office decided to allow voters to use absentee ballots this year if they were concerned exposure to COVID-19 when going to the polls. In September, the state mailed absentee ballot applications to its 2.2 million registered voters.

Since then, town clerk’s offices and the registrars of voters have been going into overdrive throughout the state, processing a record number of absentee ballot applications and, as of this week, verifying the ballots that have come in since municipalities mailed them out on Oct. 2.

Norwalk has hired about 15 part-time election staffers who process the absentee ballot applications, print labels, help mail out ballots and record ballots coming in before passing them off to the Registrar of Voters.

McQuaid said this is the first time the city has had to hire staff to help with an election. He said postal workers come by every day around 3:30 p.m. to take about six trays of election mail for distribution.

He added things have been going well since the city and the state worked out many of the kinks of the mail-in voting process during the primary elections back in August. The state sent ballots out late, and Norwalk had over 7,000 applications to vote absentee, twice than what they had for the last presidential election. “We learned a lot from it,” McQuaid said. “We educated ourselves. We’ve had to strategize and we’ve done very well. ... This is an election we’ve never, ever seen before. You just can’t tell what’s going to happen, but I can guarantee we’ll do our part well.”

This time around, things have been running a little bit more smoothly but with an unprecedented volume of absentee ballots, there have been some slipups. About 1,000 people got ballots without COVID-19 listed as a reason for voting absentee and did not have paid postage. Only about three people got the wrong ballot.

McQuaid said the office sent out these pre-COVID envelopes because the Town Clerk’s office hadn’t received the envelopes they needed, and getting the ballots out sooner was a high priority. Voters who received these can still mail their envelopes and have the postage covered. They can also write COVID-19 on the envelope as a reason for voting absentee. “This is human error,” he said. “You’ve got humans putting things together. Every city and town has this during an election. ... For the amount of work it’s taken, we’ve done well. It’s uncharted waters. You don’t want to be be behind or playing catch up.”

Journey of an absentee ballot

About 3,000 to 4,000 ballots have already been returned to City Hall either via mail or through secure ballot drop boxes around the city. There’s a drop box at City Hall, as well as one at the Norwalk Police Station and in front of the Norwalk Public Library’s main branch.

Each drop box is secure and emptied at least once a day, though McQuaid said he ends up emptying the one in front of City Hall six or seven times day. The registrar secures the ballots that are coming in and have been recorded in a cage in the Clerk’s Office at the end of each day.

Each ballot that comes into City Hall remains in the envelope until Oct. 30, when town clerks can begin opening the outer envelopes to verify the inner envelope. Each envelope also has a voter ID number which can be used to ensure no one has voted twice. The inner envelope cannot be opened or counted until Election Day.

The mail-in voting process is new to Connecticut, at least at this volume. While town clerks across the state might find it arduous, some are concerned about the possibility of voter fraud. President Donald Trump even suggested several ballots bearing votes for him were purposely thrown out in Pennsylvania. “I believe the team we’ve put together ... is dedicated to send the ballots out and get them back,” McQuaid said. “Our theory is we want to get you the ballot. We want you to vote. We have the intent to get people to vote, not the intent for fraud.”

By sending applications to every voter, the city now has a list of those who wanted an absentee ballot. Therefore, they can track if a ballot comes in for someone who actually applied to vote by mail or if it’s fraud. If someone votes by mail, it’ll be marked on the voter rolls so they can be stopped if they try to then vote in person. And if someone gets a ballot and decides they’d rather vote in person, they can do that too.

Ballots that come in late on Election Day will be tallied at the end of the day to ensure no one sent in a ballot last minute and tried to vote in person as well.

While there have been some complaints about people receiving absentee ballot applications for someone who died or moved, Wells said much of that is due to people not removing themselves from the voter rolls. The biggest offenders, he said, are college students and young adults who tend to use their parents’ address to vote and then never take themselves off the rolls when they settle down elsewhere.

There’s an interstate system which helps registrars pick up on dual registrations, Wells said, and the rolls are updated based on moving data from the Post Office and death certificates. Mailers are also usually sent out in the spring to see if people need to update their registrations.