This week, Hearst newspapers in Connecticut (my former employer) published an investigative piece on a voting debacle during the Connecticut governor's race in November. Bridgeport, the state's largest city, ordered too few voting ballots, and ultimately had to fill out photocopied versions of the scanner ballots that had to be counted by hand.
The papers found a lot of miscounted votes and discrepancies, most of which probably would have been avoided if the city's registrars had ordered enough ballots in the first place.
If you cast a photocopied ballot in last month's gubernatorial election in Bridgeport, there's a 1 in 4 chance your vote was miscounted.
A recount of the Bridgeport governor's vote from the chaotic Nov. 2 election shows that about 1,500 of the nearly 6,000 photocopied ballots used when polls ran out of regular ballots were incorrectly counted, never counted at all or misrepresented on the city's final returns. The photocopied ballots were a part of the overall 24,000 cast in the governor's race.
In three precincts, the photocopied ballots weren't even included in the city's final report.
The city is heavily Democratic and, since it has an African American population of 30 percent, more so than other towns in Connecticut, it was a serious issue for the Democratic candidate Dannel Malloy and a potentially serious issue of black voter disenfranchisement. It's not just disturbing that some votes were miscounted but that some votes might not even have been cast because potential voters heard about troubles at the polls. The problems threw the governor's race into uncertainty for a couple of days.
Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz wants the General Assembly to pass a law requiring it to request enough ballots for every registered voter in the district to prevent something like this from happening in the future. The miscounted votes and the problems didn't change the outcome this time, but they likely did enough damage to erode some faith in the electoral process.
-- Monica Potts
