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Secretary of the state candidate Stephanie Thomas at WNHH FM.
“Civic engagement” was more than an abstract concept for Stephanie Thomas when she was in high school. It provided her a warm place, with lights on, to do her homework.
That engagement took the form of going to a public library. Thomas went there after school in her hometown of Montclair, N.J., when the utility company turned off the power at her home because of unpaid bills.
She got her homework done. She graduated from high school with honors. She made the dean’s list at NYU. She launched a career as a fundraising consultant, started her own business. Two years ago she ran for state representative and succeeded in turning a GOP-held district, covering Norwalk, Wilton and Westport, blue.
Thomas spoke about that early encounter with civic engagement as she discussed her latest leap: She was the first Democrat to announce her candidacy for the position of secretary of the state, an open office in Connecticut’s 2022 general elections. The secretary of the state is Connecticut’s top elections official. Besides overseeing elections, the secretary of the state is in charge of business filings and maintaining the commercial registry. The secretary of the state also proposes and lobbies for new election laws while promoting voting and participation in elections — serving as the state’s top “civics” official.
Like the rest of the posse of Democrats officially seeking the position or mounting “exploratory” campaigns, Thomas promises to fight to expand access to the ballot through early voting and universal mail-in voting.
In an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program, Thomas, who is 53, said her top priority of all as secretary of state would be … civic engagement.
“We spend a lot of time talking about voter registration, expanding voting rights. Those things are very important,” Thomas said.
“The other leg of the stool is civic education and civic engagement. You can have as many people registered, as many people with rights, if they are not exercising that right, our representative form of democracy is lost. I feel like apathy has been winning more elections than many of our political parties.
“When you couple that with this general feeling of distrust of government, distrust of elections, it feels like we’re skating on thin ice.”
She said she’d address the challenge through efforts targeting not just K‑12 education, but with adults as well. From information about voting posted on the office’s website, through education campaigns conducted in the community, the office can help more people learn about how to cast ballots and how the system works, she argued. She cited the grassroots efforts in New Haven to promote Covid-19 vaccines and reach the underrepresented for the U.S. census as models.
That said, the desire to have early voting and no-excuse absentee balloting helped convince her to run for state representative, and now secretary of the state, she said. As a commuter for many years to a New York office, she understood how some people don’t have time in their schedules to vote between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. on a single day. Other people may not make it because a young child suddenly develops a fever or because they are suddenly beckoned to an out-of-town meeting, she noted.
So in the legislature, she served on the Government, Administration & Elections Committee, where early-voting and no-excuse absentee balloting advanced during her term. The proposals, which require approval as well in a public referendum, will go before voters, beginning in 2022.
If passed, early voting would then return to the legislature to determine the details. Thomas said she leans toward a two-week early voting period, to give people enough time but without stretching the season too long.
She was asked her take on a proposal that has divided her potential Democratic opponents: ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to choose more than one candidate for an office; they rank their picks in order of preference. In the counting process, if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, the last-place candidate is eliminated in the first round, and their voters’ second choices get their votes for the second round of counting. That continues until a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote. State Rep. Joshua Elliott, one “explorer” for secretary of the state, has made support for RCV a central campaign plank. Another contender, State Rep. Hilda Santiago, opposes it.
Thomas said she supports the concept of RCV, for reasons similar to her quest to build trust and participation in elections: “It’s a great way for citizens to avoid holding their noses” in order to vote for the lesser of two evils, and instead choose someone they like in a first slot without worrying about “wasting” their ballot.
But in practice, RCV is “just not my top priority,” Thomas continued: She worries about the cost and the complexity of implementation; she first wants to work on improving the nuts and bolts of how the state runs elections.
Thomas argued that her background raising money for nonprofits and running a for-profit consultancy give her a skill set well matched to the challenges of the secretary of the state’s position.
Amid the pandemic, she was able to raise an initial $31,000 for her campaign “in 31 days,” which she said demonstrates the support is out there for her run.
Click on the video above to watch the full interview with secretary of the state candidate Stephanie Thomas on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”