CONNECTICUT, USA — It's Election Day, and many are showing up at their polling locations, waiting to cast their ballots.
But, as some are finding out Tuesday, their local tabulator may be malfunctioning. While this may cause some to fear that their vote won't count, Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas assured voters Tuesday that each municipality has a plan to deal with those issues and that their votes will be counted.
The current tabulators that the state uses in its elections are nearly 20 years old.
"When we bought them, the iPhone hadn't even been invented yet," Thomas said at a press conference Tuesday, highlighting the machines' old age.
Their age is also a factor as to why during this year's first implementation of early voting, voters had to put their ballots in an envelope instead of feeding it directly into the tabulator as they would on Election Day.
Sealing the ballots in envelopes leads to another chance for human error, meaning some Connecticut voters may not have their votes counted. A couple hundred voters in North Stonington face that reality after nearly 1,100 ballots were sealed in an unsigned envelope, thus not having their vote counted.
North Stonington First Selectman Bob Carlson said the mishap was due to a "misunderstanding" at the registrar's office. People working there told voters that they didn't have to sign the envelope with the voter's name and information since it had a barcode on it.
“Because we had a barcode and we're using a scanner, the registrar mistakenly thought, ‘Well, if the scanner is working, we don’t have to do both. They don’t have to fill out the envelope manually and scan it,' and that was the mistake,” Carlson said.
He said the office discovered the error after a voter asked for clarity from the Secretary of the State’s office. Carlson stated that the team verified the voters' residence and the voter roll before the residents turned in their ballots, but state law says signatures are required on every early in-person vote.
Thomas said on Tuesday that according to her office, about 900 of the 1,100 ballots had been corrected and counted, but that would make 200 votes invalid still unless the voter shows up to get it fixed.
Connecticut currently does not have a "ballot curing" provision in place. This process would have the state notify voters with absentee or early-person ballots that their ballot was not counted due to a missing signature or some kind of discrepancy in signature matching. Ballot curing is a two-part process that involves notification and correction.
Thomas said she supports the state enacting a ballot-curing provision in the future.
Thomas explained that due to the tabulators' age and number, they did not want to move them around and possibly render them inoperative during election day. This is why early votes were sealed in the envelope.
In the next election, however, the state will see new tabulators.
Thomas' office and Gov. Ned Lamont announced in mid-September that there would be a "historic investment" in modernizing Connecticut's elections infrastructure through the purchase of a new, paper-based election system from Election Systems & Software (ES&S).
It will include nearly 2,700 state-of-the-art tabulators.
The machines will be fully distributed to all municipalities by the summer of 2025. For now, several municipalities received an early delivery of the new equipment in this election. Thomas said the deployment would provide an infusion of additional tabulators, allowing for the redistribution of the older machines to other municipalities that needed them.
Nine towns and cities — Glastonbury, Hamden, New Britain, New Haven, Rocky Hill, Southington, South Windsor, Vernon, and Wethersfield—received the new machines.
According to the announcement, the new ES&S machines are similar to the 20-year-old machines the state currently uses and will make for a "seamless transition for both registrars and voters. "
Despite some machines clearly showing their age this Election Day, Thomas said her office has not received many calls reporting serious or dire issues at the polls. Instead, many calls have been procedural-based, information-based, or asking questions about said tabulators.
Thomas explained that each town has their own procedure for dealing with these aging machines and that they all have an auxiliary bin that voters can put their ballot in for it to be fed through the tabulator later in the day.
Overall, Election Day in Connecticut throughout the morning and into the early afternoon has been running smoothly, according to Thomas, and she thanked the staff in town and state offices that have helped along the way to make it so.
Jennifer Glatz is a digital content producer at FOX61 News. She can be reached at jglatz@fox61.com.
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