HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas offered an Election Day update early Tuesday evening, noting that unlike other parts of the country, no nefarious action has been observed locally.
Thomas did not give an update regarding where any of the races stand but noted “it’s been a very popular Election Day so far from what I can tell.”
She touched on an arrest that was made in East Lyme, where a registered voter caused a disruption at multiple polling locations and was subsequently charged with disorderly conduct and violation of conditions, but she had little information to offer otherwise regarding the incident.
“The biggest problem we’ve heard about thus far is that we have really long same day registration lines. We’ve been working with some of our volunteer attorneys to see if they’re available to assist the registrar should they need help just to try to get that line time down, and that’s all I have,” Thomas said.
According to Thomas, the registrars and moderators have been assigned the responsibility of dealing with any tabulator failures.
“For better or worse, this has happened in many of the past elections, so they are very well-versed in how to unjam, how to use the battery backup if needed; as I’ve mentioned many times, it’s just unfortunate that the inventory is very old, so those machines tend to just go down, especially with high turnout,” Thomas said.
She added that fortunately it wasn’t raining, or else more tabulators would have failed. She didn’t provide the science behind why the equipment would fail in the rain but expressed that state voters are fortunate the weather has been clear on Tuesday.
Thomas noted that a multi-million-dollar program is ongoing to replace the state’s aging tabulators with higher quality technology, but there was only enough time to schedule a pilot program before Election Day.
“We received $20 million in bonding to replace the tabulators, but that also includes the medium and high-speed counters. So, the pilot towns, many of them have those counters available,” she said. “The high-speed can do 200 ballots a minute, and the medium speed about 75 a minute… It’s for the entire state. We just didn’t have time to roll it out by the time the RFP process concluded.”
Thomas said she has yet to hear of long lines at polling places but emphasized that same day registration locations have been backed up.
“I’ve heard, for example, about college students here in Connecticut, who may have thought they would vote in their home state by absentee, but they never received their ballot in time, so now they’re showing up to do same day registration,” Thomas said, also mentioning a man who waited in line in Stamford only to find out he was registered to vote in New Jersey.
Thomas spoke on the fact that polls would soon close and encouraged voters to get out there at the last second to cast a ballot. She said it is important to vote in every election, especially this one.
“We always hear ‘our vote is our voice,’ but we live in a representative democracy, and we have to choose the people who represent us. Whether we go out and vote for them or not, someone will represent us and make all the laws that determine what we can and can’t do in life,” Thomas said. “I, for one, would like to have a say in who makes those decisions. As I said, we have so many issues on the ballot at the local, state and federal level, it’s not just about the president.”
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Dalton Zbierski is a digital content producer and writer at FOX61 News. He can be reached at dzbierski@FOX61.com.
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