The state’s top election official say she wants the General Assembly to consider reforming the way elections are supervised. Every city and town has at least two Registrars of Voters with paid staff, but there always seems to be a major problem. The report card on last week’s election shows a lot of A’s in most towns, some B’s for minor problems, and a big red F in the Capitol City. Second-grade kids at the Gilead Hill Elementary School in Hebron got to participate in Democracy Thursday, unfortunately it’s the adults that are messing it up. The kids were drawing the names of 77 voting districts across the state for the annual post-election audit. State law requires that 10-percent of the state’s 763 voting precincts be audited after every election.
The audit requires local registrars to hand count ballots to make sure the optical scan voting machines used on Election Day are accurate. The audits have never found any gross errors. But on Election Day, the Hartford registrars had a big human error. By now everyone knows that Governor Malloy and many other voters had to wait a half-hour because voter lists were late in arriving at their precinct.
Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, the top election official in the state, describes herself as “on the warpath” about this. “It’s very difficult to get standards the same across 169 towns; and the real problem is in Connecticut we don’t have counties,” said Merrill.
Full Article: Election Day report card could lead to reform.