Registrars add 1,219 absentee ballots to tally; no races changed
STAMFORD — The registrars of voters say they have figured out how hundreds of absentee ballots were left out of an initial tabulation, and they were set Monday to file final tallies to the secretary of the state by the afternoon deadline.
The number of uncounted ballots, estimated Friday to be 1,000, ended up at 1,219, Democratic Registrar Ron Malloy said Monday. Most of the ballots came from Stamford voting districts 5, 17 and 19, Malloy said.
Adding the 1,219 ballots to the count did not change any of the race outcomes that the registrars reported Thursday, he said.
“Nobody flipped,” Malloy said.
“The winners are still the winners and the losers are still the losers,” said his Republican counterpart, Registrar Lucy Corelli.
The error occurred when workers in the registrars’ office were processing dozens of boxes of absentee ballots sent over from the
town clerk, whose office collects them from voters. The town clerk received 24,374 absentee ballots in the Nov. 3 presidential election, a record number.
“Our counters, one Republican and one Democrat, opened two boxes of absentee ballots, wrote it on the sheet as they are supposed to do, but then forgot to bring the boxes to the people who were scanning the ballots through the machine,” Corelli said. “When we saw that the number of ballots we received and the number that went through the machine didn’t match, we looked into it. We found the boxes and scanned those ballots through. It was a human error on the part of the counters we hired.”
The registrars hired a few dozen temporary workers using money granted by the state, which this year allowed all registered voters in Connecticut to vote by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. The number of mailed ballots hit an all-time high in Connecticut, though nowhere more than in Stamford, which had the largest amount.
The boxes of uncounted ballots went back to a locked storage area along with the boxes of ballots that were counted, Malloy said.
“We couldn’t account for them; it didn’t mean they weren’t there,” Malloy said. “We never declared that we had finished counting the absentee ballots. The law gives us until Monday so we have time to true-up our numbers -- the law assumes ballots will not be
totally counted for a few days after the election.”
The found ballots did not significantly change outcomes in any of the state races involving Stamford incumbents, all of whom won reelection by wide margins.
But the two districts Stamford shares with other towns were closer.
In the state Senate, incumbent Democrat Alex Kasser defeated Republican Ryan Fazio in District 36, which includes Greenwich and parts of Stamford and New Canaan, by 2,328 votes. Kasser’s lead before the count was updated was 1,141 votes.
In the state House of Representatives District 149 race, covering backcountry Greenwich and part of North Stamford, Republican Kimberly Fiorello defeated Democrat Kathleen Stowe by 394. It was less than Fiorello’s original win with 653 votes.
The change in the vote count did not affect the Stamford Board of Education races, which were the only municipal ones on the ballot except for the registrars. Corelli and Malloy
ran their races unopposed.
Gabe Rosenberg, general counsel and spokesman for the secretary of the state, said Monday the agency relies on the registrars of the state’s 169 towns to report vote counts.
“We would not have had a way to know they were having that issue in Stamford -- it was just partial results at that stage,” Rosenberg said. “They were the only ones who could have discovered it at that point, so it’s good they did.”
Usually only a handful of Connecticut voters mail in their ballots because the state allows it only under strict circumstances. But this year most registrars were inundated with absentee ballots – more than 650,000 Connecticut voters used them.
“So far we are not aware of any other problems, except we know that in New Haven someone in the town clerk’s office tested positive for COVID-19 and a number of people in that office had to quarantine,” Rosenberg said. “It didn’t affect the counting of absentee ballots, but it did affect the number of ballots
that were entered into the state’s Central Voter Registration System” before Election Day.
Because of that, voters who mailed their ballots and wanted to use the system to track them may not have been able to do so, Rosenberg said.
“Some of them may have gone to a polling place because they didn’t know for sure whether their absentee ballots were received,” he said.
The state-s mail-in voting system, expanded on the fly to accommodate COVID-19, cannot handle the volume that materialized in the 2020 election, the president of the Connecticut Town Clerk’s Association said Friday.
“Connecticut lacks the resources other mail voting states enjoy,” President Anna Posniak said in a statement. “Other states that have utilized mail voting for years are vastly different from Connecticut. They have county-based election systems, infrastructure, technology, and large staffs specifically and solely trained in election laws to handle mail voting.”
It was a huge undertaking in Stamford, Corelli and Malloy.
“I take pride in the integrity of the election,” Corelli said. “We had a lot of new people because we had so many absentee ballots. We tried to put experienced people with people who were new. We did the job; a couple of teams made an error and we fixed it.”
“We never sent inaccurate information to the secretary of the state and said we were done,” Malloy said.