Paul Bass Photo
Voters lined up on primary day.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Evans: “It went well.”
New Haven has no idea how many voters were disenfranchised because of a primary day screw-up — and has no plans to find out.
Connecticut’s leading elections official argued that the event should prompt a review and a plan for avoiding similar mistakes in the future.
The situation was “obviously unacceptable. They should be trying to find out what happened and figure out how to avoid” a repeat, said the official, Secretary of State Denise Merrill.
Merrill made the remark Thursday on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
She was responding to a question about the hundreds of postcards sent to city voters in advance of the April 26 presidential primary directing them to the wrong polling places.
As first reported in this Independent story, Bob Fraulo, the owner of Allegra Design, the company that printed and sent out the postcards, acknowledged that his operation accidentally switched the polling locations on the cards, sent on behalf of the Registrar of Voters office. The incorrect postcards went out to more than 1,000 New Haveners in Wards 3, 8, 10, and 25. Some Ward 3 residents, who vote at Career High School, were directed to Ward 25’s Edgewood School, and vice versa. Ward 10 voters, who are supposed to go to Wilbur Cross High School, were directed to Ward 18’s Nathan Hale School, and vice versa.
The office learned of the problem late in the week before the Tuesday primary. Fraulo said he agreed to pay to send out new postcards with the correct information to voters in the four wards. He said he delivered the corrected versions of the postcards to the Brewery Street post office by the end of Friday, spending $600 to have them sent first-class. He said he was sure the postcards would arrive at people’s homes by Saturday or Monday.
On primary day, many voters claimed they never received the new cards.
The corrected voter-info postcards.
“We had at least 50 folks who came down from Westville who didn’t know why they were moved there. We had to send them back to their regular districts,” said Ward 3 moderator Danny Newell. Meanwhile, Newell said, “turnout was extremely low” at Career High compared to previous elections in which he has worked as a moderator.
Six and a half hours before the polls closed on Primary Day, nine or ten Ward 3 voters had mistakenly shown up at Edgewood School by around 1:30 p.m., reported Ward 25 Assistant Democratic Registrar Larsson Youngberg.
Florence Grant, a 37-year-old freelance editor, said she received only a postcard telling her for some reason to travel to Nathan Hale to vote. So she did, learned she was at the wrong spot, then spent another 30 minutes going back to her usual spot, Wilbur Cross, to cast her vote.
It’s unclear how many others took the extra trip to vote. And no one apparently knows how many people went to the wrong polling spot.
Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans, who was overseeing her first citywide election since taking office in January, said she has no idea of the number. She also said she has no plan to try to find out.
Evans said in an interview that she had asked Allegra’s Fraulo if he could send the postcards by overnight mail to ensure people received them in time. She said Fraulo declined to do that, and she didn’t press the issue: “He told us that the way he was doing it, people would have received it by Monday.”
Nor did the city roll out its Everbridge system robo-calls, which are used to inform thousands of New Haveners about weather emergencies as well as some neighborhood meetings.
Asked if she would have done anything differently in retrospect, Evans said no. She also said she sees no need to review how her office handled the episode.
Paul Bass Photo
Merrill at WNHH.
In the WNHH interview, Merrill said mistakes like that often happen in elections. It’s a “human system,” she said. “The question is what you do about” those mistakes.
“They should be trying to find out what happened. And they should make sure they have something in place to make sure it never happens again,” Merrill said. “Part of this is the old budget problem. There’s pressure on these registrars and everybody else to save money. But that is no excuse in a case like that. They should have pulled out all the stops.”
She called 50 people going to one wrong polling place “a fairly large problem.”
Merrill said one proposal she plans to push in next year’s legislative session would help address the situation: She’d like Connecticut to follow Colorado in instituting a “ballot-on-demand” system that would enable voters to go to any polling place in town, check in, and receive a print-out of a ballot to cast right there. She also wants to bring early voting to Connecticut, and mail-in voting programs like those in states like Oregon.
No Excuses This Time
New Haven also lagged behind most of the state in counting ballots on primary night.
Merrill’s office rolled out a new system to have moderators enter voting results into a central state computer system soon after polls closed. That system allowed for nearly real-time voting results.
But not from New Haven. New Haven completed its count at midnight (and even then refused at first to release those results to waiting reporters, and did so only in response to protest).
All but 17 of the registrars from Connecticut’s 169 municipalities took up an offer from Merrill’s office to be trained in the new system before the primary. New Haven was one of the 17.
Asked why New Haven didn’t participate, Evans claimed she had “reached out” to Merrill’s office but never heard back.
“I can’t train someone on something I was not trained on,” Evans said.
Asked why 152 other communities were able to arrange training, but not New Haven, she said, “I don’t know. We’re not the only ones that didn’t.”
Merrill declined comment when asked if her office had heard form New Haven and failed to respond.
Come November’s general election, New Haven will have no choice but to participate in the new system. Primary night was a dry run for the new system. The law requires all 169 municipalities to be trained in it and to participate on Nov. 8.
“There’s plenty of time now. I will continue to keep reaching out to the secretary of the state to see when they have the next training,” Evans said.
Evans was asked how she felt primary day went overall.
“It was cool,” she said. “I think it went well.”
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Merrill, which also included discussion of her office’s efforts to promote citizen engagement and civics education as well as improvements .