The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Building an absentee ballot system to last forever
It’s hectic inside Woodbridge Town Hall, where Stephanie Ciarlegio, the town clerk, oversees a much bigger operation than usual these days. Three regular part-time clerks have doubled their hours to full-time and Alexis Bernstein, a recent college graduate with a forensics degree, has joined the team to help with absentee ballots.
Hectic, but in a strange sort of way, orderly and manageable — and that’s the point. This crazy year may be unprecedented, with one-third of all likely voters already in possession of absentee ballots and thousands more requests pouring in each day. Each of these sacred bullets of democracy requires careful handling.
Unprecedented, uncharted, uneasy, unpredictable. But it’s not once in a lifetime. Connecticut will never go back to overwhelmingly voting at the polls. Nor should we; it makes little sense.
Ciarlegio hasn’t seen much like this in her 29 years in the position — with 2,623 absentee ballots sent out already in a town with 6,500 registered voters. “If I had to start out now, I really couldn’t do it,” she tells me. “It’s a pretty busy office even without the election.”
All the more so these days, “with houses selling like hotcakes,” she said, and mortgages, dog licenses and weddings all coming in at high volume. And death certificates, which thankfully have slowed since the tragic springtime coronavirus carnage.
But it’s absentee ballots on our minds right now. In all, the state will see, by my estimate based on how the numbers are shaping up, somewhere between 625,000 and 725,000 absentee ballots cast out of about 1.75 million votes, give or take.
Fewer than expected
Based on the absentee totals in
the Aug. 11 primary — 59 percent — we might have expected 1 million in the Nov. 3 election. But barring a wild rush in the last two weeks, we’ll fall short of that milestone.
Whether it’s 600,000 or 1 million, Ciarlegio and all the other town clerks and registrars of voters across Connecticut, form the front-line vanguard of a new system. Yes, it has bugs. Yes, there are errors. In Vernon and Wallingford, passels of voters received the wrong ballots.
In New Haven, the ballot mailing system has attracted more complaints than any other city or town, the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary reported, and the Elm City has not logged the ballots it has received into the statewide sysem.
Ciarlegio’s office sent precisely one voter the incorrect ballot, and she feels terrible about that. It was on Rimmon Road, which bisects the town and meanders in and out of two state Senate districts. “Hopefully it’s the only one,” she says.
“We’re humans, and as humans we’re bound to make mistakes,” said Anna Posniak, the Windsor town clerk and president of the Connecticut Town Clerks Association. “Whenever any town clerk learns of any mistake, they work quickly to fix the error.”
And that’s what’s happening with these errors, according to the people running the system — starting with Secretary of the State Denise Merrill.
Fraud? None here, we think
Despite these few glitches — and there have been relatively few considering people like Ciarlegio and Posniak are building this airplane while it’s flying — the system appears to work smoothly.
“It is a lot of extra work but if everybody gets to vote, it’s a good thing,” Ciarlegio says.
President Donald Trump’s blustering about the corruption in mail-in and absentee balloting, which he uses to cast his vote, by the way, is not helping and is not accurate. Fraud is so rare as to be virtually nonexistent.
Still, fraud is not at absolute zero and we can’t just wave off
Republicans such as as J.R. Romano, the Republican state chairman, who issue warnings about problems. He made the point that we may never see fraud if it’s happening — drawing a rebuke from Attorney General William Tong, who accused Republicans of inciting voter suppression by fantasizing about fraud.
Here’s the rub with absentee ballots in huge numbers and the chance of fraud: Yes, it’s possible for me to get hold of an absentee ballot that’s not my own, forge a signature and cast that extra ballot.
But no, that’s not happening because it’s a felony, up to five years in prison, for which I would get almost no benefit. And the system is built to catch it, usually though not necessarily by Election Day. “We are not talking about a scalable fraud operation here,” said Gabe Rosenberg, general counsel in the secretary of the state’s office.
Managing the mail
Mail is a separate problem. Across the state we saw delays in the primaries. Ciarlegio, for example, said 40 ballots came in too late to count even though the were postmarked early the prior week, and even though the U.S. Postal Service was extremely helpful when she asked the New Haven hub for assistance in speeding up delivery.
Merrill mailed ballot applications to all 2.25 million registered voters in the state over objections from Romano and other Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven. They insisted there are so many lapsed voters on the books, so many ballot applications going out to people who no longer even live in the state, that we’re asking for trouble.
They have a point about those lists. After this election, and as a result of it, registrars will have a great head start in cleaning up the rolls. They should and they must.
For now, the operation for clerks and registrars is all about fulfilling ballot requests with a 4-part mailer labeled for each voter; fielding returned ballots and preparing to check them off on Election Day and count them by Nov. 5 — earlier if at all possible.
In the Woodbridge town clerk vault, Bernstein, the temporary employee, sorts the 1,521 ballots that voters have returned to town hall — mostly through the dropoff box on the Norman Rockwell front yard of the town hall, across a small green from a white church and the police department across the street.
As Ciarlegio shows me around the offices, which are closed to the public, she apologizes for boxes piled up, especially at the entrance to the full-room vault. The secretary of the state’s office shipped somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 absentee ballot kits — not the ballots, but the instructions, inner envelopes and outer envelopes — just to be sure Woodbridge would not run out.
Ciarlegio ordered 4,000 ballots, which will probably suffice.
She greets a young man in a suit with a death certificate, in the vestibule of the building’s side entrance. As she answers his questions, even in this small town, a steady stream of cars arrives to drop off more ballots into the shiny, white box out front.
‘It’s been peaceful’
The Secretary of the State’s Office is using federal coronavirus money to pay the towns for all this extra effort: $1 per ballot for the first 10,000, $2 per ballot after that. That’s money we’ll have to set aside somehow in the future.
How many voters will cast absentee ballots? This, of course, is the first year anyone can do it in Connecticut for basically any excuse— using concerns over coronavirus as the reason — so we have no roadmap. By Oct. 2, the first day town clerks could send out ballots, nearly 500,000 voters had requested them.
Since then, as of Friday night, we were up to 611,359 that had been processed and sent to voters. Voters had returned 318,629 of them.
Democrats vote absentee in far greater numbers, with 170,247 already returned, compared with just 45,616 from registered Republicans. Unaffiliated voters had returned just under 100,000.
And so, here in this small New Haven County town, and across the state, clerks are managing the task that’s nothing short of a total revamp in the way the state casts ballots. It requires new systems, using chewing gum and popsicle sticks to make to with old systems, and new workflows.
And despite the handwringing, it’s working.
“Human nature tells you there’s always a potential for mischief. But as of today,” said Max Medina, a Bridgeport lawyer at Zeldes, Needle & Coopper, who is contracted by the secretary of the state to be a liaison to the towns, “it’s been quiet. I have not gotten any phone calls from anybody suspecting foul play. It’s been peaceful.”
Medina, who has had experience as a court monitor in Bridgeport ballot cases, takes nothing for granted, nor does anyone.
“We’re all going to hold our breath until this election comes and goes,” he said. “Preparing for a presidential election is a big deal even when things are normal.”