Registrars cope with ballot deluge

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.