Do we need so many of these officeholders?

TBut local registrars are the kind of thing residents get all Connecticozy about each autumn, like watching leaves die and sipping lukewarm cider. The system is so quaint. So New England. So Connecticut. So very outdated.

he bane of every editorial writer in Connecticut is Election Night. Results come in sloooowly. That makes commenting on them by deadline impossible at times. So we’re thrilled have some results by press time. Congratulations to incumbent Southbury First Selectman Jeffrey Manville and new Roxbury First Selectman Patrick Roy. May you govern wisely and well.

Let’s give a shoutout, too, to all the other good people who stepped up to run for local office. Thank you for agreeing to attend meetings that run late into the night and for trying to solve knotty problems.

Also, a special shoutout to the registrars of voters in every town and city throughout the state who oversaw Tuesday’s elections. Greenwich’s registrars deserve particular praise. Their ballot was dauntingly long Tuesday because of those 230 Representative Town Meeting seats.

We do wonder, however, if Connecticut needs so many registrars. There are, officially, 339 of them, and that’s not counting all their deputies.

This state’s law on registrars is unique. Connecticut requires every one of its 169 municipalities to elect one Democratic registrar and one Republican one. Occasionally a municipality gets a third registrar if a candidate from another party or no party at all wins more votes than the D or R. That’s how the little town of Westbrook ended up with three registrars — one Democrat, one Republican and one unaffiliated.

That’s a lot of registrars for one town and for one state. But local registrars are the kind of thing residents get all Connecticozy about each autumn, like watching leaves die and sipping lukewarm cider. The system is so quaint. So New England. So Connecticut. So very outdated. We’re not knocking the contributions of these 339 individuals. But isn’t it worth calling a timeout to consider whether the rulebook needs to be written on a computer rather than with a quill ? All those registrars for even the tiniest of towns (yes, we’re talking about your 187 residents, Union) translate to hefty office expenses for taxpayers. And it’s really just based on the idea of each party keeping an eye on its opposing number.

Of course, Connecticut’s fixation on steady habits means we also accept that there’s no rush to make election results official. In an era when you can get next-day delivery for everything from diapers to car tires, Connecticut’s certification date in 2020 was Dec. 3. (Delaware’s was two days after the election.)

To be fair, it did take the entire nation a few days to figure out who won the presidential election last year because of all those mail-in votes. To quote the eventual winner, Joe Biden, “Democracy is sometimes messy.”

So, yes, the registrars deserve more than cold leftover pizza and an e-mail hug for all the hard work they’ve done. But maybe it’s time to think about a new process.