Expanded absentee ballots will pass. Then what?

When it comes to election reforms, it seems clear Connecticut will not waste this coronaviris crisis.

The state House and Senate, barring a huge shock, will vote for absentee ballot expansion for this year — the ability of voters to cast ballots by mail or in dropoff boxes just by saying they’re afraid to go to the polls on Election Day.

We already have that right for the upcoming Aug. 11 primary, which means almost nothing to almost everyone. The question was whether the General Assembly would make it happen for Nov. 3, and it looks like it will.

That means the absentee balloting will jump from just a few percent to maybe 40 percent of the whole turnout in Connecticut. Hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots will pour into town clerks’ offices, for state legislative races and the contest for U.S. president, to be counted feverishly, by hand, by some hardworking poll workers.

So the deeper question is, what comes next? Will Connecticut continue to fall behind other states and revert to our 18th century rules after this year? Or will the state, after decades of fits and starts, finally adopt, permanently, the two reforms of universal absentee balloting and early, in-person voting?

And beyond that, does the state need to reform the whole way we register voters, conduct elections and count ballots? That is, are we OK with 169 electoral fiefdoms, each with at least two registrars of voters, most of them elected as Democrats or Republicans, many of them coming to work once a week or so?

Since we’re using the public health crisis to rethink so much of public culture, I’d suggest reforming that big picture as well. Voting could run more reliably and smoothly if the people staffing the system — dedicated as they are — were nonpartisan and divided not by city and town but by regions such as counties or congressional districts.

“We have a system that was effective in about 1830,” said Hank K. Brown, of Wethersfield, a lobbyist — who was not endorsing my radical reform idea.

Secretary of the State Denise Merrill proposed dramatic changes in 2015, cutting the number of registrars sharply and creating a system under which they’d be appointed. That followed an election in which her Hartford voting place — and that of the governor — opened late, inexcusably, because local officials didn’t have the ballots in hand.

That same Election Day in 2014, voters rejected, by a 52-48 margin, a constitutional referendum question that would have added the twin reforms of early voting and expanded absentee balloting. It lost in part because no one campaigned hard for it and in part because the wording of the question was impossible to understand.

Merrill’s 2015 idea didn’t fly — gee, politicians didn’t want to eliminate a system that rewards campaign aides — but a compromise that led to more training for local election officials. Since then we’ve moved part of the way toward another ballot referendum, which could happen in 2022, or maybe 2024.

“As necessary as this bill is, it is hopefully the first step and not the last,” Merrill told the General Assembly committee that wrote the bill, in a public hearing Tuesday.

She explained that despite the 2014 defeat, voters in both parties overwhelmingly want those reforms. And most states already have them in one form or another.

So what’s the problem? Partly, skeptics of expanded voting — mostly Republicans — say the reforms invite fraud in the form of people voting illegally, or casting multiple ballots. Democrats counter that instances of fraud are infinitesimally rare.

As Merrill testified Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz — Merrill’s predecessor — told a small gathering in Windsor that election fraud, according to a conservative think tank, happened 0.00006 percent of the time. Maybe I’m leaving out a zero; it’s basically never.

The Republicans, led in this state by party Chairman J.R. Romano, continue to warn of the possibility of fraud and they are right. I’m holding in my hand a ballot application for my daughter, who lives and votes in Boston. I could send it in, register her as an absent voter, receive the ballot at my house, send it in with her name and succeed in casting two ballots for the primary.

And risk a jail term — when I could help my preferred candidates by, oh, I don’t know, donating money or calling friends on their behalf. So, yes, fraud can happen fairly easily but it doesn’t. And why would it?

Republicans, including Rep. Mike France, R-Gales Ferry, ranking GOP member of the legislature’s elections committee, want to at least move slowly and make sure protections are in place. “We’re doing things differently in a number of ways that haven’t been vetted,” France said Wednesday. “The challenge is that we don’t have the protections in place that many of these other states that use voting by mail have in place.”

He said he’s likely to vote for the measure in Thursday’s special session because of the coronavirus emergency.

The expansion reforms should happen forever, and that’s a stickier question.

As for the deeper reforms, changing the whole system, that’s partly a practical matter. Eventually we could actually want to count ballots with highspeed machines, for example — something that’s less practical in individual cities and towns.

And, really, do we need Democrats and Republicans elected to do the work of Democracy? Consider, late Wednesday afternoon when I called Matthew Waggner, the Democratic Registrar of Voters in Fairfield, he was on hold on the other line, arranging for tents to set up outside wach of the town’s polling places on Aug. 11 — for coronavirus safety equipment, or to help voters avoid having to enter the buildings.

That’s a credit to the folks in Fairfield, going above and beyond. But it’s not a partisan activity, nor is anything else the registrars do. And in fact, Waggner prefers to just say he’s registrar, not the Democratic registrar. He signed his written testimony in favor of the Nov. 3 ballot bill without listing his party.

So, why not take the full step, and professionalize the whole system, Greenwich to Putnam, Stonington to Salisbury?

No, many elected officials say, we don’t need to do that.

“I think the system is pretty well set up to handle the number of problems that we see,” Waggner said. “There are a number of benefits you get from having local officials…beyond accountability, it’s just accessibility.”

A blind constituent pointed out difficulties that could be fixed, for example, and he’s making it happen.

“I’ve been very impressed by their abilities to work within the system that they have,” said Rep. Dan Fox, D-Stamford, cochairman of the elections committee.

That’s true for now. If we truly modernize voting, as we should, we may want to truly modernize the whole apparatus. Why wait for a crisis that we won’t want to waste?