The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Confusion reigns after 20K absentee ballots go unmailed
A week before Connecticut’s first widespread mailin ballot primary, town clerks said Tuesday that 20,000 absentee ballots have yet to be mailed and are blaming a mix-up between Secretary of the State Denise Merrill’s office and the mail vendor contracted to help with the process.
Merrill’s office counters that there has been no mix-up. Mailing of the last ballots close to the Aug. 11 primary election was always slated to return to the duty of the town clerks this week, a Merrill spokesman said.
At issue is who was, or is, supposed to mail the 20,000 ballots — roughly 7 percent of all absentee ballots requested for next week’s primary.
The chaos and confusion comes as town clerks were already overwhelmed by the mass mailings and by preparations for an election that is expected to see as much as 60 percent of the vote by mail because of the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s unsettling that our town clerks are now being left with a nearly impossible task to complete in a week when the Secretary of the State knew there were going to be problems.
This is incompetence at its worst,” said Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, who sent a letter about the issue to Merrill on Monday.
It was unclear Tuesday whether any voters would not have a chance to cast ballots as a result of the confusion. Ballots must be received by town clerks by the end of the day on Aug. 11 — next Tuesday — to count.
A list of the 20,000 names was shared by some members of the state House Republican caucus.
“Secretary Merrill’s test run has failed,” Fasano said in a written statement. “Republicans have warned about the potential for issues, Secretary Merrill ignored those concerns and now we are facing problems and some people may not be able to have their vote counted. That's inexcusable.”
Some Democrats, including the Middletown mayor, have also criticized the process developed by Merrill, a Democrat.
But Merrill’s office contends some chaos was expected. The state, after all, has never done this before. Spokesman Gabe Rosenberg said Tuesday that 267,000 ballots had already been mailed by Cathedral, the Rhode Island-based fulfillment business and longtime state contractor enlisted to help with this year’s massive mail-out.
Returning the mailing responsibilities to town control — as is traditionally done for absentee ballots in every election — was expected once the mail batches become so small that it no longer made economic sense for a large mail house to handle the mailing, Rosenberg said.
“The switch was made late last week because the mail house had already processed and mailed more than a quarter of a million absentee ballots and the remaining numbers ... were too small to be done by them efficiently,” Rosenberg said.
That’s because there are about 40 different ballot designs required for next week’s primary, reflecting local races.
House Republicans called for an investigation into the procedures, which were outlined in a document and sent to town clerks in early June.
Anna Posniak, president of the Connecticut Town Clerks Association, claimed in an email to fellow town clerks that the Secretary of the State’s office has been negligent in its communication with her, an assertion Merrill’s office vehemently denies.
The confusion comes as many Republicans charge that Connecticut and other states are not equipped to handle mass-mailing elections and police them for fraud. The Aug. 11 primary is considered a preview of the Nov. 3 general election, in which Connecticut voters will be allowed to cite fear of COVID-19 as a reason for requesting an absentee ballot.
The switch in mailing responsibilities was originally scheduled to happen Monday, Rosenberg said, according to guidance given to town clerks in June. He said it was moved up two business days to Thursday with approval from Posniak in a Thursday phone conversation with Ted Bromley, the elections director in Merrill’s office.
Bromley followed up with Posniak in an email to confirm what had been discussed over the phone, according to a copy of the email provided by Rosenberg.
But Posniak in her email to town clerks said she was not told the clerks would need to process an additional 20,000 ballots.
“Had this information been given to us on Friday, I know that 169 Town Clerks would have worked over the weekend to get those ballots to their voters,” Posniak said. “I am extremely concerned for the voters in our large cities as this neglect by SOTS may disenfranchise their vote next Tuesday. If you unable to reprocess all of last week’s volume of applications in addition to this week’s requests, please reach out to me and we will try to get you some assistance from others towns with lower volumes to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised.”
Rosenberg contended Tuesday that Posniak was told about the 20,000 ballots by Bromley on Thursday.
For most towns, Rosenberg said, the mailing is less than 100, and clerks should already have the ballots and other supplies on hand if they followed the instructions sent in June.
In the 12 towns with more than 400 ballots to process, Rosenberg said a staffer from the Secretary of the State’s office was sent to help with the mailing. In Middletown, 1,600 people have yet to receive their ballots.
“A week out from the primary is absolutely insane,” the town’s Democratic mayor Ben Florsheim said Tuesday.
“The way elections are run in the state is destined for chaos,” he said. “When it comes to the resources we need to run elections at the local level, we’re not getting them,” said Florsheim, who believes the Secretary of the State’s office lacks the funding and resources it needs to make sure elections run smoothly in Connecticut.
The system was developed over the last three months, after an order by Gov. Ned Lamont loosening Connecticut’s tight restrictions on who is eligible to vote by absentee ballot.
House Republicans placed some of the blame on Cathedral, the contractor, which, the Republicans said, did not keep up with the heavy flow of approved ballot requests.
“It has become obvious that the entire absentee ballot mail-in voter process has been mismanaged, based on all the contacts that we have had with the elected officials who know this system best, our local registrars and towns clerks, both Republican and Democrats,’’ House Republican Leader Themis Klarides and Deputy Leader Vincent Candelora said in a written release Tuesday.
Rosenberg contends there is no breakdown.
“All of this was planned and clearly communicated to the town clerks,” he said. “Our Election Director and the head of the TCA speak daily, and today we completed our tenth call with all of the clerks and registrars since March. This process has been open and transparent from beginning to end.”