Lessons Sought From Voting Fiasco

Hours after most Connecticut communities had reported their election results, New Haven’s leading voting official arrived at Edgewood School after midnight Wednesday with a team of election workers and began counting 1,968 ballots. By hand.

“Congress,” the official, Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans, called out. ​“Rosa DeLauro.”

The three workers in front of her, Deputy Registrar Liz DeMatteo, Arthur Natalino, and Eddie Camp, wrote down what she said.

“State Senate,” Evans continued. ​“Gary.” She was referring to incumbent Gary Winfield.

The trio picked up their pens once more.

Fifteen minutes later, they were on ballot number three. One thousand nine hundred sixty-five to go.

Westville Alder Adam Marchand arrived with boxes of ham sandwiches left over from a campaign headquarters. It was going to be a long night.

Evans had been awake and at work since 3 a.m. the day before. She had been racing around New Haven all Tuesday and Tuesday night to polling places where, as at the Ward 25 operation at Edgewood, voting machines had broken. Truman School. Wilbur Cross. Wexler-Grant. Troup … Election workers had worked past midnight rescanning ballots into replacement tabulators. Edgewood had gone through three machines. The first two apparently broke because voters dripping with rain from outside submitted wet ballots that shut down the machines. A third machine had an electrical malfunction. Over at Mauro Sheridan School, several machines had jammed. Water didn’t seem to be the problem.

“This is crazy,” Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, who had been at Wexler Grant’s Ward 22 polls since 6:30 the morning before, remarked while waiting for new machines at at 1:30 a.m. ​“In eight years, I’ve never seen anything like this happen.

“We can’t even get mad because we’re not the only ones this happened to. We just got to wait our turn.”

The machine menace was one of two train wrecks for the voting process in New Haven this election. The other concerned Election Day Registration (EDR) and voting. Hundreds of people waited up to four hours to cast ballots at City Hall because only two deputy registrars (including DeMatteo) were on hand most of the day to input their information into the secretary of the state office’s database. An emergency visit from secretary of the state office lawyers helped enable hundreds to sign up in time for an 8 p.m. deadline in order to vote, using an unorthodox method to speed up the process: Having dozens en masse raise their hands and attest orally that they were first-time Connecticut voters. (That led to an evening of legal wrangling.)

Democratic Registrar Evans reflected on the Election Day scrambling Wednesday morning while taking a brief break in the sleep-deprived registrar’s office for her first bite of food in more than a day.

“It was very frustrating with all the machines breaking,” she said. ​“At the end of the day, voters were able to vote.”

Merrill: No Excuse

The state official responsible for elections, Denise Merrill, said many communities experienced wet-ballot breakdowns and other machine malfunctions, too. (Including in New York.) New Haven has more machines and voters than most other communities in the state; the machine breakdowns didn’t signal an inherent problem there, she said.

She had a different take on the EDR chaos, which was a rerun of similar breakdowns in 2014 and 2016.

“I think that they were very unprepared for election day registration. I don’t think there is any excuse for that. It has happened before,” said Merrill, who was reelected Tuesday as secretary of the state.

She noted that local officials later in the day deputized Yale law students to help process the new registrations in the state’s system. That can be done, and can be planned for in advance, she said.

“Granted, it was a larger than expected turnout. But we did advise them: Expect a larger turnout,” Merrill said.

Merrill said she plans to reintroduce proposals to make the process easier, including early voting, no-fault absentee voting (meaning anyone can submit ballots), and mail-in voting.

Mayor Toni Harp said Tuesday’s problems provided lessons for improving the process in the meantime.

For one, she said, the city should deputize more people in advance to sign up election day registrants. She also suggested that they not all have to come to City Hall, but rather have them able to register at ward poling places.

“There should have been an adequate number of people. Ask for help before. Have a plan and ask for help before,” Harp said. (She noted that she does not have authority as mayor to make decisions about how to run the election. The local registrar and the secretary of the state have that authority.)

She also suggested working with local colleges like Yale to help students register in time rather than crash City Hall on Election Day. An estimated 80 – 90 percent of the hundreds of people waiting hours at a time in EDR lines Tuesday were from Yale. Many said they came because of problems with out-of-state absentee ballots or other confusion.

As for the broken machines, ​“we’ve got to take a look at our scanners and come up with a way when weather is an issue to remind people that they have something to protect the ballots to give to people who look like they may have a wet jacket. It can create quite a problem.”

Harp noted that the registrar’s office recently entered into a contract with a consultant who observed Tuesday’s election and will recommend improvements for future elections.

“If we put our heads together,” Harp said, ​“we’ll be able to have a [better] process.”

Still At It

Back at Edgewood School at 9 a.m. Wednesday, students and teachers were in class. In the gym, two vote-counters remained: Alder Marchand and Democratic Party attorney Sue Weisselberg.

The hand-counting had gone on for hours during the night, they said, but hit a wall. Fortunately, two more machines arrived — and they worked. The crew switched to feeding the ballots into them, producing two print-outs of results. (They explain more in the above video) Now Marchand was reading off the sets of numbers.

“Nine-one-four plus 789,” he reported, as Weisselberg did the addition on her cellphone calculator.

At the municipal office building at 200 Orange St., counting of EDR ballots continued.

By day’s end, it seemed, Connecticut would have official totals of New Haven’s vote. By week’s end, New Haven was to receive a detailed ward-by-ward official breakdown of the total vote, including absentee ballots.

The 2019 primary election is ten months away.

Sonya Schoenberger contributed reporting.