Fixes Floated For Broken Elections

Local college officials can help New Haven fix its broken elections by encouraging students to register before Election Day and telling them the right place to vote.

That was one of over two dozen recommendations that city alders, polling place moderators, and student voters suggested Thursday night for unbreaking the system.

The conversation took place during Thursday night’s City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) committee hearing in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

Eight local voters testified during an hour-a-half-long public hearing about what went wrong on the first Tuesday of November 2018, when wet ballots, broken voting machines, understaffed polling places, and a glut of same-day registrations resulted in hundreds of people waiting hours to register and vote.

Not to mention the fact that polling place moderators, volunteers, and the city registrars spent days counting and recounting ballots by hand before submitting final vote tallies to the secretary of the state’s office, long after the rest of the state had reported its results..

The alders heard from Kevin Arnold, the city’s Election Day Registration (EDR) moderator, about how his team of 16 registrars and supplemental staff were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of mostly Yale students who came to City Hall for same-day registration last November. Even though the secretary of the state had explicitly warned all cities and towns to prepare for presidential election-level turnout for the state and federal midterm elections, his team was still understaffed, though they did bulk up to 25 workers over the course of the day. And they did turn away roughly 25 people who were not able to register before the polls closed at 8 p.m., though they did succeed in registering around 700 same-day voters.

But as much as the hearing was tempered by frustration, at the long EDR lines and at the confusion around polling place changes in even and odd years, everyone who testified had some practical, specific suggestions on how New Haven could do voting better. By this reporter’s count, 25 different improvements, some big, some small, were discussed on Thursday night.

Some highlights:

Get College Students With The Program

• Get the city, the alders, and local university administrators and student groups to work more closely together to educate students about where, when, and how to vote, as well as what and who is on the ballot. And that voter education should take at least a month before Election Day so that prospective student voters can register well before the registration deadline, which is one week before the day of the election.

“Hopefully the city and the universities can work together,” Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter said, so that students know not to wait until the day of to decide on whether or not they want to vote in Connecticut.

Monica Maldonado, the student government president at Gateway Community College, and Timothy White, the head of the Yale College Democrats, both testified on Thursday night that they are hosting separate student voter forums and that they would like to see city officials and alders attend and help clarify for their student peers what went wrong last November and what could and should happen differently during the next election. Gateway’s voter expo will take place on March 20 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the Yale Dems will be hosting a forum with Secretary of the State Denise Merrill on March 5 at 7:30 p.m.

“Essentially, it was a full-blow crisis,” White said about the EDR waits and confusion in November. ​“To many, it represented a failure of democracy.”

• Clarify state law to ensure that people who get in line for EDR before 8 p.m. are allowed to vote. Currently, state law ensures that any registered elector in line to vote before 8 p.m. can vote. But those protections don’t apply to people in line for same-day registration.

Winter asked Arnold if that type of state statute clarification would be advisable, from his perspective.

“I think so,” he said. ​“That’s one way to do it.”

But, he said, that would also add to the workload for already overtaxed EDR registrars. Instead, he said, he would like to see ​“improved efficiency, and an improved process.”

Hire More Registrars

• To improve the process, Arnold suggested, New Haven should hire more EDR registrars, and train them all in how to enter voter registration information into the secretary of the state’s online system.

For the past few elections, including the 2014 and 2018 midterms and the 2016 presidential election, he’s had only around 16 EDR staff, and only a few of them have been trained in the registration input system. He told the alders that he would like to have closer to 30 or 35 properly trained same-day staff, so that everyone is equipped to enter registration information directly into the state database, and so that staff can take much-needed breaks during the 14-hour workday.

Winter also encouraged him to push the secretary of the state’s office to allow New Haven to have more than 12 computers authorized for EDR registration input.

Arnold said that 12 is the current upper limit that New Haven is allowed to have for technical reasons, but he confessed to not knowing exactly why the city could not have more, especially considering that it has so many more EDRs than anywhere else in the state.

Younger, Better Poll Workers

• Outside of EDR, polling places need more, and younger, and better paid and better trained poll workers. Paul Chambers and Jim O’Connell, who served as polling place moderators in 2018 and who have been poll workers in New Haven for decades, said that the city consistently struggles to attract enough people to work a demanding, 14-hour day for basically minimum wage every Election Day.

Chambers suggested that alders use their community email listservs to collaborate with the city registrars to recruit new pollworkers. O’Connell suggested that they reach out to high schools in particular and try to attract teenagers who may be looking for pocket money, have the stamina to work a 14-hour day, and have eyesight strong enough to read names and addresses printed in small text on the voting rolls

“Number one,” he said. ​“They have good eyes. I’m serious. That’s a big problem.”

Inspect Polling Places

• The city registrars should also conduct a comprehensive review of all city polling places, O’Connell said.

There are 40 polling places in even-numbered years, when State Senate and Assembly districts and federal Congressional districts determine where one votes, and 33 polling places in odd-numbered years for municipal elections.

O’Connell said that check in tables and voting booths must be adjacent to dedicated phone lines to allow the moderator easy access to the city registrar. But those phone lines aren’t always in the most convenient places in any given building, he said.

• The state should also allow poll workers to use electronic poll books, so that they can check in voters on computers rather than through voluminous stacks of paper printed in illegibly small text, he argued.

A Voter Bill Of Rights?

• Aaron Goode, the founder of New Haven Votes and the co-chair of New Haven’s League of Women Voters, suggested that the city codify the rights of voters in its own municipal Voter Bill of Rights.

He said that document should state that no one should have to wait more than one hour to vote; same-day registration should take no longer than two hours; poll workers should never request to see forms of identification greater than what is mandated by state law; polling signs should be visible, well-placed, and written in both Spanish and English; voting information on the city’s website should be accurate, clear, and easy to find; voters should be able to contact election officials by phone, text, or email and get prompt replies; and post-election audits should be transparent and properly noticed.

Goode said that one voter told him that last year’s election ​“made the DMV look like a model of user-friendliness and convenience.” A local voter bill of rights, he said, could help ensure that future elections don’t fall again to such a dubious distinction.