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    Saturday, November 09, 2024

    Top state Democrats raise concerns about delay in counting early voting ballots

    A line of residents wait to vote on the first day of Early Voting at the Voter Registration Office in Groton on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Sarah Gordon/The Day)
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    Two of the General Assembly’s highest-ranking Democrats are raising concerns over how municipal voting workers will deal with the stacks of sealed early voting ballots they need to count on Election Day.

    In a Friday letter to Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff noted that approximately 198,000 ballots had been cast as of Thursday during just the first four days of early voting in the state. This is in addition to 68,000 absentee ballots.

    “And we still have 10 more days of early voting,” the letter noted, warning that local registrars of voters will be “inundated with opening and counting” possibly tens of thousands of early ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5.

    “We believe it is of the utmost importance that your office be prepared to offer any and all assistance and guidance to local registrars in the quick and accurate tallying of early votes,” Looney and Duff wrote. “We look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible regarding a plan.”

    This year marks the first time early voting is being offered in Connecticut.

    Unlike Election Day voting, when ballots are fed directly into a vote counting machines, those participating in early voting place their completed ballots into envelopes and seal them.

    Those envelopes must be opened and the tri-folded ballots flattened before they are fed into tabulators on Election Day, New London Democratic Registrar Rich Martin said on Friday afternoon.

    “Those sounds like little things, but they can be time consuming when you’re dealing with so many ballots,” he said. “Our hope is to begin the pre-work ― the unsealing and flattening ― on Election Day morning and then put them through to be counted.”

    Martin said the number of early ballots will determine what time counting will begin on Election Day. He said, if necessary, the city’s six-person poll team will be supplemented with more personnel.

    In East Lyme, early voting turnout exceeded even the most optimistic expectations of Democratic Registrar Wendi Sims. Even after pre-ordering 4,000 ballots ― 900 more than the state recommended ― she just sent out for 3,000 more to keep up with demand.

    “The volume has just been wild,” she said Friday afternoon.

    Sims said she doesn’t expect any issues with early vote counting on Election Day.

    “We already hired eight extra people to handle absentee ballots and we’ll convert six of them ― three teams of two ― to opening the early voting envelopes on Election Day. Then we’ll probably assign someone to sit and just feed those ballots into the machine.”

    j.penney@theday.com

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