Thomas Breen photo
An absentee ballot dropbox outside 200 Orange St.
New Haven’s official tally of absentee ballots filled out and returned to the city/town clerk’s office jumped by over 70,000 percent in two days — a sign that the local office is chipping away at its ballot backlog and stepping up use of a state-mandated database less than two weeks from the Nov. 3 election.
Those latest absentee ballot numbers are included in an updated, town-by-town AB (absentee ballot) breakdown sent out three times a week by Secretary of the State Communications Director Gabe Rosenberg.
According to the most recent update, which Rosenberg sent out by email Wednesday night and which can be downloaded here, a total of 2,728 absentee ballots have been returned to New Haven’s city/town clerk office.
That’s quite the jump from New Haven’s 7 total returned absentee ballots listed in the state’s official update on Monday.
“The fact that there’s a number there that’s four digits right now, that’s a significant improvement over Monday, when there was one digit,” Rosenberg said in a Thursday afternoon phone interview.
Wednesday night’s official state update also showed that New Haven has processed a total of 11,910 local absentee ballot applications. On Monday, that number was 10,213.
Rosenberg explained that these numbers are almost certainly undercounts of the actual number of absentee ballots and applications processed by New Haven’s city/town clerk.
Rather, they reflect AB numbers officially entered by each municipality’s town/clerk into the Secretary of the State’s Centralized Voter Registration (CVR) system.
That’s the online database that allows any voter in the state to check on their registration, their polling place, and the status of their absentee ballot.
“The goal is to have the data entered in real time,” Rosenberg said. He said the information uploaded by each municipality usually takes no longer than 24 hours to be reflected in the state’s official tally.
Rosenberg said the system is supposed to work in such a way that, “When a voter looks it up and sees their ballot isn’t returned, then they know something’s wrong and they can do something about it.” Such as call or email their city/town clerk.
Up until recently, New Haven’s city/town clerk office had been entering absentee ballot information into a separate local online database because of concerns about delays with using the state’s database, according to this Oct. 2 article by the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary.
“Clearly they have started making an effort to get the information into the Centralized Voter Registration system,” Rosenberg said about the jump in New Haven’s official state tally.
“There’s no doubt that there’s a backlog.”
Rosenberg said that Friday’s email update will likely reflect an even greater increase in the number of New Haven absentee ballots returned than did Wednesday’s. He pointed out that Stamford has officially processed over 23,700 absentee ballot applications, as well as over 14,600 absentee ballots returned. He said it’s unlikely that Stamford has seen over half of its ballots returned, while New Haven has seen only a quarter of its ballots returned. The city is clearly still playing catchup, at least in terms of submitting data to the state.
(Even when the state database has up to date info on a voter’s absentee ballot request, it’s not always the easiest to understand, as pointed out by local Tweeter DFA New Haven.)
Anyone in the state can vote by absentee ballot for the Nov. 3 general election, thanks to a no-excuse absentee bill passed by the state legislature this summer. The state legislature also recently passed a new law that allows registrars of voters and town clerks the option to open the outer envelope of absentee ballots four days before Election Day in order to determine the total number of absentee ballots received to reject those ballots that do not have the appropriate signature and date. They cannot start actually tallying votes until Election Day itself.
Complaints Up, And Now Down
The jump in New Haven’s official absentee ballot tallies come as the city/town clerk’s office has taken some heat from New Haven residents and state officials for how it’s handled the election to date.
Several New Haveners spoke to the Independent earlier this month about receiving absentee ballots addressed to other city residents. City/Town Clerk Michael Smart told the Independent that his office would fix any such issue — an unfortunate result of human error — within 24 hours. He urged residents who have concerns about their absentee ballots to call his office at (203) 946‑8349.
Smart also told the Independent in a recent article that he plans to use a $93,000 state grant to hire up to 15 new temporary staff members to help process and count absentee ballots.
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Last Thursday, meanwhile, Secretary of the State staffer Christine Bartlett-Josie (pictured) told the Board of Alders City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) Committee that the secretary’s office has received more absentee ballots-related complaints from New Haveners than from residents of any other municipality in the state. (Click here to watch that hearing in full, and here to read a story about it by the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary.)
She said most of those complaints were from residents who had applied for an absentee ballot, had not yet received one in the mail, and wanted to know when their ballot would arrive.
“I don’t like to hear that New Haven is number one in complaints,” Bartlett-Josie said during that hearing.
“We’re still sort of lagging behind the other cities in terms of how much is reported,” she added. “I know they’re inundated and busy, but so is everybody else. … I don’t like to be the city with the most issues and complaints.”
On Thursday, Rosenberg told the Independent that the “the complaints [from New Haveners to the Secretary of the State’s office] have died down a little bit in the last day or so” as the city/town clerk’s office appears to have stepped up its responsiveness to local voters as well as its input of data into the state’s CVR system.
He said his office had been receiving a significant number of complaints from New Haveners on social media and over the phone. Those complaints tended to follow the same pattern, he said.
“I requested my ballot three weeks ago. I haven’t gotten it yet. And when I look it up on the website, it doesn’t say it’s processed.”
Rosenberg stressed that not entering the local AB numbers into the state’s database “was doing a disservice to voters” because the only way for a member of the public to see if their application has been processed and if their returned ballot has been received is through that state database.
“It seems that now they are on track,” he said about New Haven’s clerk’s office.
Smart did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article. He and Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans also did not show up to the aldermanic CSEP committee hearing last week, instead submitting written responses in advance to the alders’ questions.
“This is an incredibly important election with a really complicated process,” Downtown Alder Abby Roth said during that hearing last Thursday. “I know they’re busy, but this is a part of their responsibility to share information” with the public. Some questions “require dialogue, not a written answer.”
This reporter called the city clerk’s office’s general phone number twice Wednesday afternoon. After several unanswered rings, an automated answering machine message responded, “At this time, we are processing an overwhelming volume of applications and ballots due to the pandemic. Your call is important to us.” The message encouraged one to call back between 3 and 5 p.m. to talk to a live staffer, and to leave a message at the beep.