Abdussabur Presses For Petition Rejection Answers

Mayoral challenger Shafiq Abdussabur doubled down on his critique of the registrar of voters office for ​“gross inconsistencies” in its review, and subsequent rejection, of hundreds of his campaign’s Democratic primary petition signatures — even as he said he won’t appeal a state judge’s dismissal of his ballot-access lawsuit.

During a Thursday morning press conference at Abdussabur’s mayoral campaign headquarters at 347 Whalley Ave., the retired police sergeant and former Beaver Hills alder stood alongside city clerk challenger Robert Lee and local attorney Patricia Kane in front of a plastic foldout table holding a dozen face-down pieces of paper.

As reporters looked on, Abdussabur and Lee and Kane turned those pages over to reveal sample entries from the petitions that he and Lee submitted to the Democratic registrar of voters back on Aug. 9 in their bid to make it onto the Sept. 12 primary ballot.

Running as a slate, the two candidates needed to submit 1,623 signatures from registered New Haven Democratic voters to qualify for the ballot. They said they submitted more than 2,700. Each page has space for up to 20 signatures. Each signatory is asked to sign their name, print their name, and provide their birth date and street address to allow for the registrar’s office to confirm that they are indeed an active, registered New Haven Democrat.

After a weeklong count, Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans and her colleagues found that Abdussabur and Lee had turned in only 1,406 valid signatures.

They disqualified the rest of the signatures for five stated reasons: too many were from non-New Haveners, too many were from non-Democratic voters, too many were missing corresponding addresses, too many were illegibly written, and the backs of too many of the petition pages, where petition circulators and notaries have to sign, were improperly filled out.

Abdussabur subsequently took the matter to court, and had the case dismissed on the grounds that the primary election is already underway and changing which candidate names appear on the ballot now would be confusing and disruptive to voters. That means that two-term incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker and former legal aid attorney Liam Brennan are the only two mayoral candidates who have qualified to compete in the Sept. 12 Democratic primary.

On Thursday, Abdussabur showed members of the press a sample array of petition pages submitted by his campaign to the registrar’s office. Some of the pages had been rejected in their entirety. Some had been accepted, but had individual signatures turned down (as opposed to the whole sheet.)

Abdussabur revealed that on any given petition page, the registrar’s office did not indicate which specific signatures they found to be valid and which they rejected.

Rather, on the back of each page, the registrar’s office noted how many total signatures on the page were valid. 

And, on the cover page for each petition-sheet submission, the registrar’s office listed the same five reasons — around residency, party affiliation, legibility, address, and back-of-petition-page-completeness — as explanation for why the petition as a whole was rejected. (Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans did not respond to multiple requests for further comment by the publication time of this article.)

With blue and yellow highlighters and plenty of margin notes, Abdussabur and his campaign annotated petition pages to indicate which signatures they are confident are valid.

They determined which are valid through an internal campaign ​“audit” that involved double checking signatories’ names against the state’s voter registration database.

However, as Abdussabur and Kane made clear on Thursday, they could only speculate as to which specific signatures had been rejected on any given petition page, because the registrar’s office did not call out which individual signatures were valid and which individual signatures were not.

“We don’t know,” Abdussabur said when asked if he could point to one specific signature he knows was wrongfully rejected by the registrar. ​“It’s impossible to know.”

“There’s no way to fact check the registrar,” Kane said.

Abdussabur, Kane, and Lee made those petition pages available one day after a state court judge threw out a lawsuit Abdussabur and Lee had filed against the registrar of voters, seeking to mandate that their names be put on the Sept. 12 Democratic primary ballot on the grounds that they did indeed submit 1,623 valid signatures.

The press conference also took place soon after the secretary of the state’s office confirmed that Abdussabur has submitted enough petition signatures to qualify to run as an unaffiliated mayoral candidate in the Nov. 7 general election. (Fellow mayoral challenger Tom Goldenberg has also qualified for the general election ballot because he has been endorsed by the local Republican Party.)

The state judge dismissed the case because of how close the primary is, meaning that Abdussabur never got to make his case in court as to the merits of his claim. So, on Thursday, notwithstanding the lawsuit’s outcome, Abdussabur hammered home the critique he still has of the petition process: that is, that the registrar of voters inappropriately rejected too many of his petition signatures.

“We did our own internal audit of every single signature page that we turned in, both the ones that were rejected by the registrar’s office … as well as the ones that were accepted,” Abdussabur said. 

And through that ​“audit,” undertaken by four campaign staffers, ​“we absolutely found over 1,623 valid [New Haven] Democratic signatures, which would have qualified us for the ballot.”

Abdussabur and Kane said they don’t plan on appealing state Superior Court Judge Paul Doyle’s dismissal of the lawsuit, even as Kane laid into the Purcell principle logic the judge relied upon as ​“a huge setback” for democracy in Connecticut. ​“We’re going to rest on the court. We have respect for Judge Doyle. We’re going to move forward to try to recover our campaign,” Abdussabur said. ​“This is a big blow for our campaign, for fundraising efforts, not being on the September ballot.”

He and Kane also said they’re still considering whether or not to file a formal complaint against the registrar’s office with the State Election Enforcement Commission (SEEC). ​“We are still evaluating all this,” Kane said.

Asked why they thought one mayoral challenger, Liam Brennan, was able to successfully petition his way onto the Democratic primary ballot to face off against two-term incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker, while two challengers — Abdussabur and Tom Goldenberg — saw their petitions rejected, Kane said, ​“We can’t speculate on that. All we can say is: We know about this campaign, we know there were inconsistent standards applied.”

And yet, Abdussabur stressed over the course of Thursday’s presser, regardless of what happens next, there remain many still-unanswered questions around why his attempt to petition onto this year’s Democratic primary ballot was unsuccessful.

The key to answering those questions is which specific signatures were rejected by the registrar’s office and why.

And yet, Abdussabur said, he has not been able to find that out. He knows the big-picture reasons why his petition was rejected: too many non-New Haveners, too many non-Democrats, illegible signatures, etc… And he knows which pages were rejected in their entirety, a likely indication of a problem with the back of a given petition page as opposed to any one signature on the front.

But, these several weeks later since his petition was rejected by the registrar, he still doesn’t know which specific signatures were deemed valid and which were not.

“In the fairness of transparency, in the fairness of talking to the public,” Abdussabur raised those questions on Thursday. ​“This is why people lose faith in government. This is why people lose public trust.”

He and Kane and Lee then puzzled through individual petition pages, trying to understand why one page had, for example, only one valid signature according to the registrar’s office, while Abdussabur’s ​“audit” found there to be 10 valid signatures.

Abdussabur admitted on Thursday that, during his campaign’s petition ​“audit,” they too found that 10 petition pages ​“were improperly filled out by the person signing off” on the back of the page. Another 100 signatures were likely invalid because of the residency of those circulating the petitions.

He added that illegibility is a dubious reason to disqualify signatures. So is not printing the right address alongside a signature on the petition page.

“This wasn’t a situation where we sent someone to Hamden to get signatures. They went to doors in these neighborhoods and people signed these signatures,” he said.

“This was not a failure of this campaign or anyone working in it,” Kane said. ​“It’s a failure of the process in Connecticut. The registrar of voters is the person who makes the determination” if the signatures are valid or not. ​“An inconsistent standard was applied.”

Asked about what comes next for his campaign and if he still plans to run in the November general election as an unaffiliated candidate, Abdussabur said, ​“We are still evaluating the viability of our run for November based on this outcome.”

Click on the video below to watch Abdussabur’s press conference in full.