Cuts Loom For Elections Crews

Budget cuts will cause no problems at election time this year — or else they’ll prove ​“catastrophic.”

It depends whom you ask.

Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans and City Clerk Michael Smart — both facing cuts in their offices in the proposed new city budget — offered those conflicting views at a City Hall hearing.

Evans’ office — which maintains voter rolls, conducts voter canvasses, and staffs polling places for the primary and general elections — faces an 8 percent, or $75,000, cut in the mayor’s proposed $547 million operating budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1. Smart’s office — which handles absentee ballots and candidate petitions and certifies elections results — faces a 7 percent, or $40,000, cut.

The two weighed in about those proposed cuts at a Board of Alders Finance Committee budget workshop this past Thursday night in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall. The discussion occurred as municipalities throughout Connecticut prepare for Democratic and Republican primaries this August for state offices as well as a November general election.

“I’m here to oppose the 7 percent decrease to my department,” Smart said during his testimony, ​“which will have a catastrophic effect on our office and on our operations.”

Smart told the alders that that proposed cut would overwhelm an overworked department that will already be stretched thin during a busy election year because a staffer is about to go on maternity leave.

Election years call for Smart’s office to receive, verify and code applications for absentee ballots, and then distribute those ballots to appropriate voters. He said that his department works closely with the registrar of voters to create and print the actual election ballots.

Smart said that all of this work has to be done on top of his office’s routine operations of their counter at City Hall, where the staff helps residents access mortgage, lien, and other land records.

Three full-time staff members besides Smart work in the City Clerk’s office. His position is part-time.

He said that the land records specialist currently has a ​“high-risk pregnancy,” and will likely be out of the office for six to eight months starting later this spring. He will need to hire and train one full-time employee to cover her absence, he said. He is in the process of hiring and training a new bilingual services clerk specialist, a position that has been vacant for over a year.

“All this is happening in the middle of an election season where we really need to make sure that our staff is up to par,” he said. ​“To cut us down and show no regard for our office is concerning.”

East Rock Alder Anna Festa praised Smart for running the one department at City Hall that she does not regularly receive complaints about. She asked Smart how the proposed cuts to his department would materially affect city residents.

“There would be a line” at the City Clerk’s desk for anyone looking to do public document research, Smart said. ​“Phones would be ringing off the hook.” He said that, overall, his office would run slower and would have to prioritize election year responsibilities to the detriment of its day-to-day operations.

The bulk of the department’s $40,000 in proposed cuts are currently in the ​“Other Contractual Services” and ​“Printing and Binding” line items of the mayor’s budget. Smart said that these cuts, regardless of which line item they ultimately fall on, would only serve to slow down the operations of a department that carries an extra workload on top of its usual duties each election year.

He said around 3,000 residents voted absentee in 2016, which was the greatest number of absentee votes in the city history.

“I cannot in good conscience say that these cuts would not slow us down,” Smart told the Independent after the budget hearing.

Evans, on the other hand, said that the proposed cuts to her budget would not have a significant impact, even considering how her department has struggled in recent years with incorrect mailings and long lines at polling places.

Testifying alongside Republican Registrar Dolores Knight, Evans said that the majority of the proposed cut to her department would come to her printing and binding budget line item, which would drop from $110,000 to $50,000.

Evans said that her department already printed this fiscal year the necessary signs for all 40 polling places that will be open in November. She said that her department plans to move in house much of its remaining printing and binding work, including for the ​“Alpha” lists that contain the names of all the registered voters who can vote at a particular polling place. She said that in previous years that work has been done by outside printing services, but now she will be using the Xerox machines owned by the city and the Board of Ed.

Festa asked her if and how the proposed budget cut would affect the registrar’s abilities to run a smooth and efficient election.

“It shouldn’t have any negative effect,” Evans said. ​“We should still be on track.”

“I’m just concerned, if you guys get too much of a cut, how will it affect our voters,” Festa persisted.

Evans said that the prep work that her department has already done this year, as well as last year’s purge of over 25,000 voters from the city’s ​“active” rolls, means that her department will simply not need to spend as much money on printing, binding and mail as they have had to in previous election cycles.

In 2016, the registrar’s office’s mistakes helped lead to hours-long waits to vote, polling places without ballots, and a week-long delay in tabulating official results. The office’s disarray also prompted a last-minute visit from the Secretary of State and emergency help from the mayor’s office to prepare for the expected rush of people registering to vote on Election Day.

The Board of Alders must approve a final version of the budget by the first week of June.

The next budget workshop, during which the Finance Committee will interview more department heads about their respective allocations in the mayor’s proposed budget, is on Tuesday, March 27 at 6 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.