Rep. Chris Caruso (D-126) discussed the voting problems in an interview with Lennie Grimaldi from OnlyInBridgeport.com, and reporter Brian Smith from DoingItLocal.com. Caruso is calling for an investigation and for Democratic registrar Sandi Ayala's resignation or removal from office because of massive voting problems in the recent election.
This comes on the heels of the City of Bridgeport defying the Secretary of State's call for an additional audit of all twelve of the precincts that were kept open an additional two hours by a judge's order on election night.
3 comments:
The blame for their refusal to run additional audits is not entirely Bridgeport's.
The costs for the state-mandated audits are borne entirely by the individual towns.
I would imagine the refusal - which is otherwise very ill-advised - was based solely on budgetary reasons.
The refusal, even if based on budgetary reasons, may have been accurate interpretation of the law. Nobody has yet produced a written directive from the SOTS that Bridgdport supposedly defied. There may be politics at work here, such as deflection of the problem away from SOTS, just like the proposed "audit" or "recount" by SOTS as reported in newspapers was patently unclear as to what procedure was proposed and the purpose of the count other than to satisfy curiosity.
If the SOTS had any doubt about the totals, why not resolve them in the two week period during which election results may be challenged? The simplest thing to have done would be to ask that during the initial hand counting (or the apparent head moderator's recount) that the number of photocopied ballots be separately tallied.
I believe that the district moderators' ballot tally sheet reconciles numbers of ballots by type, and "hand cast ballots" should give an indication of photocopies during voting hours, if the paperwork was properly filled out and matches the SOTS forms for moderators shown in the online moderators' guide.
The audit law specifically excludes hand cast ballots and is a comparison of machine cast votes vs. tallies of votes from hand tallied ballots for that machine. If some other definition of "audit" was intended (the story changed from "audit" to "recount, and from "mandated" to "requested" and finally one reporter said, "Bport refused to let SOTS count the ballots" when SOTS themselves would NOT have been counting any ballots added to a normal Connecticut audit. CT audit law is not what most think an "audit" is: it resolves no questions of official incompetence, as an interested paries -- those who conducted the election -- also do the audit. It's an ROV do-it-yourself, non arms length, "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" type of inconclusive exercise.
CT statutes don't even require the ROV to send copies of machine results tapes to SOTS on election night or at time of filing an "audit report". Since the documentation is basically whatever the ROv says happened, nothing ensures SOTS can drill down to the original machine results tape for corroborating how many votes were cast on election night. I'm sure many people would love to have their expense reports "monitored" so loosely.
IF SOTS was just going to make an oral agreement with Bridgeport and tell reporters about it later, would voters be satisfied with that nontransparent approach to clarifying what happened? Knowing that no matter what happens, the SOTs reports that "the election /audit went perfectly," I tend to think not.
If you compare election night reported totals to new totals and they match, you still don't know anything about whether the election was properly conducted. Reports were of people being handed privacy folders with multiple ballots inside, and of voters trying to check in and being handed ballots without checking in "because we have bigger things to worry about right now" (other than the election's trueing and corroborating mechanisms?).
If those complaints occurred in districts other than the open-late districts (they occurred during regular voting hours), then the proposed SOTS remedy would not have addressed the real issues with this election and in fact would be at risk of not demonstrating anything substantive..
If the proposal was serious, show it to me in writing. If the exercise was not going to reveal anything that clarified substantive questions about the election, Bport was right not to pay for what may well have boiled down to a grandstanding exercise.
The refusal to do what SOTS mandated/requested/tried to negotiate (pick one or more), even if based on budgetary reasons, may have been accurate interpretation of the law. Nobody has yet produced a written directive from the SOTS that Bridgdport supposedly defied. There may be politics at work here, such as deflection of the problem away from SOTS, just like the proposed "audit" or "recount" by SOTS as reported in newspapers was patently unclear as to what procedure was proposed and the purpose of the count other than to satisfy curiosity.
If the SOTS had any doubt about the totals, why not resolve them in the two week period during which election results may be challenged? The simplest thing to have done would be to ask that during the initial hand counting (or the apparent head moderator's recount) that the number of photocopied ballots be separately tallied.
I believe that the district moderators' ballot tally sheet reconciles numbers of ballots by type, and "hand cast ballots" should give an indication of photocopies during voting hours, if the paperwork was properly filled out and matches the SOTS forms for moderators shown in the online moderators' guide.
The audit law specifically excludes hand cast ballots and is a comparison of machine cast votes vs. tallies of votes from hand tallied ballots for that machine. If some other definition of "audit" was intended (the story changed from "audit" to "recount, and from "mandated" to "requested" and finally one reporter said, "Bport refused to let SOTS count the ballots" when SOTS themselves would NOT have been counting any ballots added to a normal Connecticut audit. CT audit law is not what most think an "audit" is: it resolves no questions of official incompetence, as an interested paries -- those who conducted the election -- also do the audit. It's an ROV do-it-yourself, non arms length, "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" type of inconclusive exercise.
CT statutes don't even require the ROV to send copies of machine results tapes to SOTS on election night or at time of filing an "audit report". Since the documentation is basically whatever the ROv says happened, nothing ensures SOTS can drill down to the original machine results tape for corroborating how many votes were cast on election night. I'm sure many people would love to have their expense reports "monitored" so loosely.
IF SOTS was just going to make an oral agreement with Bridgeport and tell reporters about it later, would voters be satisfied with that nontransparent approach to clarifying what happened? Knowing that no matter what happens, the SOTs reports that "the election /audit went perfectly," I tend to think not.
If you compare election night reported totals to new totals and they match, you still don't know anything about whether the election was properly conducted. Reports were of people being handed privacy folders with multiple ballots inside, and of voters trying to check in and being handed ballots without checking in "because we have bigger things to worry about right now" (other than the election's trueing and corroborating mechanisms?).
If those complaints occurred in districts other than the open-late districts (they occurred during regular voting hours), then the proposed SOTS remedy would not have addressed the real issues with this election and in fact would be at risk of not demonstrating anything substantive..
If the proposal was serious, show it to me in writing. If the exercise was not going to reveal anything that clarified substantive questions about the election, Bport was right not to pay for what may well have boiled down to a grandstanding exercise.
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