Committee begins review of Stratford House election
Bipartisan panel holds its first meeting over ballot mix-up
A Committee on Contested Elections, the first to be convened by the Connecticut General Assembly in 34 years, held its initial meeting Friday and broadly mapped a path toward gathering evidence about a ballot mix-up that marred the re-election of Rep. Philip Young, D-Stratford.
Young was sworn in Wednesday with the rest of the legislature, but the House unanimously agreed to convene a committee to investigate whether his 13-vote victory over Republican Jim Feehan should stand, given allegations that as many as 76 voters were given the wrong ballots in a precinct that favored Feehan.
Feehan’s lawyer, Proloy K. Das, submitted a formal complaint Friday that asks “the House of Representatives to declare that, as a result of the disenfranchisement of voters in the 120th Assembly District who were given the wrong ballots, a new election must be held for the office of State Representative for the 120th Assembly District.”
The panel ordered the lawyers for the affected candidates to provide a list of recom- mended witnesses and documentary evidence by 5 p.m. Tuesday. The panel, whose chairman has subpoena power, is tentatively scheduled to meet again next Friday.
Ultimately, Young’s fate will be resolved by the full House of Representatives, where Democrats hold a 90-59 majority, with two vacancies from the resignations of Democrats who joined the Lamont administration. The committee of two Democrats and two Republicans can only issue a report and make recommendations to the House.
The committee’s deadline for issuing a report is Feb. 4.
The ballot mixup occurred at
Bunnell High School, a polling place for two House districts, the 120th and 122nd. It is one of eight precincts in the 120th. The results at Bunnell were 859 votes for Feehan, 608 for Young and 6 for a petitioning candidate, Prez Palmer. Overall, more than 10,000 votes were cast in the race.
Reviewing the election are two Democrats, Reps. Michael D’Agostino of Hamden and Gregg Haddad of Mansfield, and two Republicans, Reps. Jason Perillo of Shelton and Vincent Candelora of North Branford. D’Agostino is the chairman.
Feehan attempted to overturn the election results in court, but a trial judge and the Connecticut Supreme Court dismissed his lawsuit, concluding that the state Constitution unambiguously gives each chamber of the General Assembly sole jurisdiction over resolving contested elections of its members.
The court proceedings revolved around the issue of jurisdiction and never considered evidence as to what happened.
“I think our charge is to identify what the true facts are, utilize those facts and present a report, make a recommendation based upon the facts,” Perillo said. “And if we are able to do that, and I think we are, then I think we’ve done our job and kept politics, partisanship, gamesmanship out of the issue.”
D’Agostino opened the meeting by reading from a court decision regarding a municipal election where a Connecticut court wrote about the conflicting interests in ordering a new election. It noted that every election is a snapshot in time — and someone who voted in an initial election might not be able to vote in an ordered rematch.
“Moreover, that snapshot can never be duplicated,” D’Agostino said, reading aloud. “The campaign, the resources available for it, the totality of the electors who voted in it, and their motivations, inevitably will be different a second time around.”
The challenge is how to weigh the interests of any voter who was disenfranchised in the first election against the interest of those who did vote. In the decision read by D’Agostino, the court warned that ordering “a new and different election would result in their election day disenfranchisement.”