Patricia Webb could easily have walked down the street from her house to vote in Ward 20’s primary elections Tuesday at Lincoln-Bassett School. But Alderman Charles Blango’s campaign had other plans for her.
“I just did absentee for the first time today,” said Webb as she sat on her front porch in Newhallville Tuesday. “I always go to the polls, but since they suggested, I decided to send it in.”
Webb said she’s been heading to the New Haven polls every election for decades. She planned to do the same this year, too. She’s able-bodied. She’s in town. Under law, she’s not supposed to vote by absentee ballot.
This year, though, she got a notice in the mail from Blango “recommending” that she vote absentee, she said. Blango, the incumbent aldermanic candidate backed by City Hall, faced labor-backed challenger Delphine Clyburn in Newhallville’s Ward 20; Clyburn won the election.
The letter said she could avoid having to travel over to the polls and stand in line, Webb recalled.
The City Clerk’s office reported sending 1,359 requested absentee ballots to voters all over the city. More than 10 percent of them — a full 144 — went to Ward 20 voters.
Fifteen of those ballots were disqualified before the elections even started, when a police officer brought them in from the ward on Monday afternoon. He had picked them up from a Blango campaign work, who wasn’t supposed to touch and gather completed absentee ballots. Only cops and family members of absentee voters can. Blango called the delivery an “honest mistake.” (Read about that here.)
Ada Raiford, who lives a few blocks from Webb, said campaign workers for incumbent mayoral candidate John DeStefano campaign workers picked up her absentee ballot around 11 a.m. Tuesday. “I wasn’t going down there [the City Clerk’s Office],” she said. “This time, I filled it out and gave it to one of the people who were coming around.”
At least some of the voters reached at their homes Tuesday wouldn’t have been able to vote in person and thus qualified to vote absentee. The city sent nearly 30 ballots to Constance Baker Motley, a public-housing complex on Sherman Parkway that houses mostly disabled seniors. Many also went to seniors living in Newhall Gardens, a similar facility on Daisy Street.
“I didn’t feel like walking to the polls with my bad knees,” said Bertha Lawson, so she sent her ballot in on Sept. 5.
James Belcher, who also lives down the street from Lincoln-Bassett, said he wasn’t feeling well enough to vote in person this time around. So he called Blango a few weeks ago and asked about the absentee ballot process. Blango helped him send in an application, Belcher said, but didn’t tell him how to fill it out.
Belcher mailed his ballot a week ago — with the Blango box checked.
But even though Patricia Webb took the incumbent’s advice to vote absentee, she didn’t end up voting for him.
“I decided to vote different this time,” she said. “I think it’s time for a change and want to see what new people would do.” Webb said she chose Tony Dawson for mayor and Delphine Clyburn for alderwoman.
Her husband, James, also received a suggestion to vote absentee in the mail from Blango. But he decided not to vote at all.
The use of absentee ballots as an “early voting” system has been questioned repeatedly over the years. Click here and here for previous stories about allegations of voting fraud in Dixwell’s Ward 22.