Markeshia Ricks Photo
Merrill testifying at the Capitol in favor of an early-voting proposal.
Denise Merrill isn’t looking to give 16-year-olds the vote, but she wants them to sign up to get ready.
Merrill, who is currently running for a third term as Connecticut’s secretary of the state, is pushing a proposed law to allow 16-year-olds to pre-register to vote.
“Pre-registration: I love it. Young people are starting to get involved. We’ve got to capture them early,” she said during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“I want to allow 16-year-olds to register early to vote. That’s when we can get the most people to register because they’re going in to get their driver’s licenses. Not that they’d be able to vote yet before 18, but at least they would feel they are part of” the system.
As secretary of the state, Merrill oversees Connecticut’s voting rolls and elections — putting her in the limelight at a time when federal investigators have uncovered evidence of Russia’s tampering with both.
Just last week Merrill attended a briefing in Washington with the director of homeland security who informed her colleagues around the country that Russian hackers had succeeded in accessing Illinois’ voting rolls in 2016.
She previously learned that the Russians had attempted to break into the databases of 21 states, including Connecticut’s. All the others identified the attempts and thwarted them.
Merrill said she’s confident the state’s upcoming elections will be conducted securely, largely because we still rely on paper ballots.
She said she’s grateful that the University of Connecticut’s voting center warned her office away from purchasing “electronic poll books” that would have enabled local officials to send voting results from the polls directly and quickly to her office over the internet. The state had allocated the money for Merrill to purchases the items, and she put the contract out to bid. She forwarded the proposals from the three finalists for vetting to the UConn experts, who reported that all would be vulnerable to outside hackers.
The biggest potential vulnerability she sees lies in the way all 169 towns and cities maintain voting rolls with closed-loop routers. She is sending security consultants to each community to advise on improving security, including adding two-factor authentication to the routers.
“The biggest threat to our democracy,” Merrill argued, “is us,” not the Russians.
The threat is the loss of faith in the integrity of elections, the danger that people “will not believe our results are real,” she added.
“I think we’ve seen our last uncontested election,” she predicted.
Merrill said she and other secretaries of state are “racking our brains” to figure out “how we can reassure people” that elections are fair. She’s hoping to win four more years to work on that.
Click on the Facebook Live video to watch the full interview with Secretary of the State Denise Merrill on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Topics covered include her reelection campaign, early voting, and nationwide threats to votings rights.