Though Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill (D) said on Monday that her office was ready for a successful Election Day, on Tuesday morning, her office said it appears the City of Hartford did not distribute voting lists to the polling places.
As local CBS Connecticut reports, Merrill’s office states that when voters showed up this morning at the polls in Hartford, there were no lists for poll workers to check – and check off.
The lists reportedly should have been delivered Monday night or early Tuesday morning, prior to the opening of the polls. Hartford registrars were driving around the city Tuesday, dropping off the voter lists, but several hours of voting time were lost.
Additionally, at some polling places, poll workers were allowing people to vote by affidavit, after showing an ID. At others, voters were turned away because their names could not be checked off.
In 2013, the Democrat-led Connecticut state assembly voted to approve driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.
A spokesman for Merrill’s office said the situation in Hartford is “completely unacceptable.”
The problem could lead to an emergency court filing seeking to extend hours, a situation that could be a rerun of the governor’s race in 2010 between the same two candidates – Dannel Malloy (D-WFP) and Tom Foley (R) – when polls in the city of Bridgeport were kept open later by court order due to a lack of sufficient ballots. Malloy won the election that year by a slight margin by carrying the state’s three largest cities – Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport.
Malloy and Foley are tied in the current race. A third candidate, independent Joe Visconti dropped out over the weekend and endorsed Foley.
Merrill said on Monday there would be no reoccurrences of the well-documented problems in the 2010 election, according to Fox CT.
“We learned lessons from 2010,” she said. “We are going to be really ready for this Election Day.”
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