Paul Bass Photo
The Ward 7 line extended into the hallway at 200 Orange St. at 10:30, normally a slow voting hour.
Voters scrambled to find the right places to cast ballots in Tuesday’s presidential primary after receiving postcards that sent them outside their neighborhoods to incorrect voting places.
Stack of new registration and party-enrollment cards received in three hours Monday morning at the Registrar of Veters office.
Florence Grant, a 37-year-old freelance editor and writer who lives in the East Rock neighborhood, set out to vote at Nathan Hale School in Morris Cove. It seemed weird to leave the neighborhood, because last fall she’d voted at Wilbur Cross High School. But she had received a postcard from the city telling her to vote at Nathan Hale instead.
When she arrived there, a volunteer who was checking addresses and voter registration informed her that something was, in fact, off: She was supposed to be voting after all at Cross, the designated location for residents in New Haven’s Wards 9 and 10.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Grant, finally at Cross.
The Ward 18 volunteer “was really nice, really helpful,” Grant said. But the trek back to Cross cost her a good 30 minutes.
Grant still had time to cast her vote at Cross, where she selected Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Voters in four of the city’s 30 wards — the Hill’s Ward 3, East Rock’s Ward 10, Morris Cove’s Ward 18, and Westville’s Ward 25 — received similar postcards with incorrect information from the city last week. Ward 3 residents, who vote at Career High School, were directed to Ward 25’s Edgewood School, and vice versa. Ward 10 voters, who are supposed to go to Wilbur Cross High School, were directed to Ward 18’s Nathan Hale School, and vice versa.
Allegra at Olive and Grand.
Bob Fraulo, owner of Allegra Design print shop at Olive Street and Grand Avenue, took responsibility for the error.
His company has printed and sent out the voter info cards for eight years now, he said. His crew prints four cards per sheet of cardboard, then cuts them up into four postcards. Voters’ names and addresses appear on one side of hte sheet, their polling stations on the other.
The problematic sheet was for voters in Wards 3, 10, 18, and 25.
When his printing crew flipped the sheet to match the names on one side with the stations on the other, it inadvertently did so from “top to back” rather than in a “landscape,” or side-to-side, maneuver, he side. Hence the mismatches.
Batch 2: The corrected postcards.
“It was human error,” Fraulo said. He said once he learned of the error last Thursday, he printed up corrected versions of the cards for the more than 1,000 voters in the four wards, then had them to the Brewery Street post office by the end of Friday so they could arrive at voters’ homes Saturday or Monday. He said Allegra paid for the new printing and $600 or so worth of postage.
Not all voters got the new cards or noticed them. Grant, for instance, said she never received the promised reprint that had gone out. Poll workers in the four wards were reported to be directing confused voters to the proper spots Tuesday.
Ward 25 Assistant Democratic Registrar Larsson Youngberg reported that nine or 10 Ward 3 voters had mistakenly shown up at Edgewood School by around 1:30 p.m.
No “Real Time” Results
Patrick Mitchell of Edison Research, at left in photo, manned an exit poll outside Ward 25’s voting station on behalf of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC, and the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, the city is an outlier in this primary election in hesitating to embrace new technology to produce fast, publicly available election returns.
The Secretary of the State is rolling out a new system to provide “real-time results” to the public soon after the polls close. Moderators at each polling place can send in results as soon as they’re tabulated directly to the Secretary of the State’s new system, which will post the town-by-town results online at this site. No more waiting hours — or at times days — for results.
At least not in most of Connecticut. All but 17 of the state’s 169 municipalities had their moderators undergo training to use the new system Tuesday night. So they will test out the system as soon the primary polls close, according to secretary of the state spokesperson Patrick Gallahue.
Unfortunately for New Haven voters, New Haven was one of the 17 that failed to participate. So New Haven will again spend hours long into the night before having official returns available for public view.
Gallahue said Tuesday’s participation in the roll-out was voluntary; the office will test out the system. For the November general election, all municipalities — including New Haven — will be expected to participate.
In the run-up to Tuesday’s primary, New Haven’s Registrar of Voters office opened extra hours to accommodate last-minute registrations. Monday alone — from 9 a.m. to noon, the registration deadline — 146 people in town either registered to vote or switched form unaffiliated to either Democrat or Republican in order to participate in the primary.
Forman: Bummed, but ready for November.
Jay Forman missed the deadline. He showed up at the Registrar of Voters office around 10:45 a.m. Tuesday hoping to register the same day to vote. He learned that voters can do that in general elections, but not primaries. Forman, 31, a music teacher, moved to New Haven last fall. “I just didn’t handle my business” to register in time, he rued.
Forman had hoped to vote for Bernie Sanders Tuesday. “He speaks to me,” Forman said. “Money in politics” — a signature issue for Sanders, who has called for campaign finance reform to limit the influence of corporate and Super PAC donors —“is a hot button for me.”
While in the office, Forman registered so he can vote in November.
“What party?” he was asked.
He had planned to register Democratic in order to vote in the primary. Now that he had missed the deadline, he marked “unaffiliated” instead.
Polls are open until 8 p.m. Tuesday for the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. For more information on where to vote, call the Registrar of Voters Office at (203) 946‑8035. Or click here to find your polling place. (The city polling place list can be found here.)