Connecticut voters in Tuesday’s election will be able to choose whether to allow the expansion of absentee voting in the state so that people no longer need a specific excuse to cast a mail-in ballot.
And they are being asked to make that decision at a moment when a deep partisan divide has emerged over trust in the country’s elections and a stream of criminal allegations continue to emerge out of Bridgeport, where the city’s 2023 Democratic primary for mayor was overturned due to widespread allegations of absentee ballot fraud.
Connecticut’s Democratic leaders and organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Conservation Voters, the Connecticut Project, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters have spent months informing people about the ballot measure and advocating for its passage.
During roundtables, community events and door-knocking campaigns, those groups have argued that the measure, which would make every registered voter eligible for an absentee ballot, is a major step in expanding voting rights and one that 28 other states have already taken.
“The bottom line is that while voting in person is easy for many, it’s not easy for all, especially working voters, elderly people and people with disabilities,” Coralys Santana, an advocate with the Connecticut Project Action Fund, said as she led off one of the roundtables at the state Capitol.
But in order for the referendum to pass, it will need to overcome Republican voters’ growing distrust in the American electoral process and the drumbeat of news regarding criminal charges and absentee ballot abuse that arose out of Bridgeport this year.
Four people, including Wanda Geter-Pataky, the vice chairwoman of Bridgeport’s Democratic Party, were charged in June for allegedly helping voters to fill out absentee ballots during the city’s 2019 mayoral contest and illegally taking possession of those ballots ahead of the election.
Geter-Pataky and several Democratic members of Bridgeport’s city council have also been referred for potential criminal charges due to their actions during the city’s 2023 primary, which became national news after surveillance videos captured numerous political operatives depositing stacks of absentee ballots into drop boxes.
The Connecticut Republican Party is citing those criminal allegations as part of a last-minute campaign to defeat the ballot measure and to argue that Connecticut needs more rigid requirements for voting, including signature verification on absentee ballots.
“This is just another mechanism for Democrats to try to utilize a different system that allows for nefarious activities to take place,” Ben Proto, the chairman of Connecticut’s Republican Party, told The Connecticut Mirror.
The state GOP, Proto said, intends to spend a “not insignificant” amount of money in the final weeks of the election on radio, digital and text campaigns, which will highlight the alleged crimes that occurred in Bridgeport and encourage people to vote down the ballot measure.
Proto has also used his platform as the leader of the state Republican Party to advocate against the referendum in editorials and during his frequent public media appearances leading up to the election.
Democratic leaders, meanwhile, are busy reminding people that the state has already tested out the expansion of absentee voting in recent years.
Rep. Matthew Blumenthal, D-Stamford, who helped to get the referendum on the ballot this year, said Connecticut voters have already witnessed the benefits of universal absentee voting when lawmakers temporarily expanded the reasons why someone could request an absentee ballot during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Blumenthal, who is co-chair of the legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee, pointed out that 35% of voters utilized absentee voting during that presidential election year, as a result.
“Absentee voting for all is not a new technology. It’s not a new practice. Many other states have enacted it with excellent results, and people have experienced it in the 2020 election,” Blumenthal said.
The partisan divide
It’s not clear how the allegations of absentee ballot fraud in Bridgeport will affect the referendum, which advocates have worked for more than a decade to get onto this year’s ballot.
A poll conducted for the CT Mirror in mid-September indicated likely voters in the upcoming election are leaning toward supporting the measure, but it showed there is still substantial opposition to its passage.
Out of the 800 likely voters in Connecticut who answered the poll, 49% said they supported expanding absentee voting through the amendment, while 40% said they opposed it. The remaining 10% said they were uncertain how they would vote or refused to answer the question.
The poll, which had a margin of error plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, clearly showed the ballot measure is likely to split heavily down party lines.
Roughly 79% of the Democrats who responded to the poll said they supported expanding absentee voting to every voter in the state, while 81% of Republicans said they opposed that expansion.
Meanwhile, people who identified as independents were split down the middle with 45% supporting the referendum and 45% opposing it.
The poll also included a follow-up question to gauge how the recent onslaught of news about alleged absentee ballot fraud in Bridgeport’s municipal elections might influence the final outcome of the referendum — if at all.
The staff conducting the poll informed the respondents that there have been “credible allegations of absentee ballot abuse in recent Bridgeport elections.” And they asked whether that information made people more likely or less likely to support the referendum.
In response, roughly 37% of the poll respondents said the news about Bridgeport’s elections made them more likely to vote against the ballot question. And 40% said it made no difference.
Those poll results also broke heavily along party lines, however.
Roughly 63% of Republicans were in the group that said the allegations of absentee ballot abuse in Bridgeport made them more likely to vote against the referendum.
At the same time, 67% of Democrats told the pollsters that the recent criminal charges and allegations of absentee ballot fraud in Bridgeport would not sway their vote on the ballot measure.
The push to engage voters
Organizers with the ACLU Rise PAC, which has helped lead the campaign to pass the referendum, said they’ve rarely encountered questions about Bridgeport over the past several months as their team knocked on more than 4,000 doors across the state.
David McGuire, the executive director for the ACLU, said it was far more common for the organizers to encounter voters who were unaware that the referendum was on the ballot at all. And when they were informed of the ballot measure, he said, most of those voters voiced support for universal absentee voting.
McGuire believes simply alerting more people to the existence of the ballot measure can lead to the referendum’s passage, which is why the ACLU and its partners spent the summer and fall canvassing neighborhoods in Hartford, Glastonbury, Manchester, Farmington, New Britain, Waterbury, Bridgeport, New Haven, Hamden, Farmington and West Hartford.
Other groups that are supporting the referendum, however, said they have had to grapple directly with people’s concerns about Bridgeport and the city’s absentee voting process.
Gemeem Davis, a cofounder of Bridgeport Generation Now, said some of the Bridgeport voters she interacted with via texting campaigns and community forums have voiced apprehension over the ballot question because of the city’s troubled history with election scandals.
Thousands of Bridgeport voters were forced to go to the polls four times in the past year in order to decide who would be their mayor after a judge ordered the city to hold a new primary and general election due to the allegations of absentee ballot fraud.
“There’s definitely some apprehension out there,” Davis said. “But percentage-wise, they are not the majority.”
Davis, who has been an outspoken critic of Bridgeport’s local Democratic leaders, does not shy away from acknowledging the problems in Bridgeport when someone asks about it. Bridgeport Generation Now referenced the issues with Bridgeport’s elections directly in the texts it sent out to likely voters earlier this year.
“As Bridgeport voters, we know it’s past time that we fix our local elections,” the texts read.
At the same time, Davis and her organization have made the argument that expanding absentee voting to every registered voter could help to reduce the influence of illegal behavior during low-turnout municipal elections, like Bridgeport’s mayoral contest last year.
“We are certainly trying to communicate that expanding access to the ballot through universal absentee voting is a good thing, and that the more people have access to voting, the larger voter turnout will be and the harder it will be for political operatives to zero in on a really small group of people and target them,” Davis said.
“The current system in Bridgeport really is about political operatives that get in the middle of the absentee ballot process and manipulate people,” Davis added. “Absentee ballots in and of themselves are not a problem.”
The current law allows political campaigns and partisan officials to distribute applications for absentee ballots and to help voters fill out those forms. The work of political campaigns is supposed to stop there, but numerous complaints from Bridgeport have alleged political operatives also help people to fill out their ballots and, in some instances, take the ballots before they are completed.
If the ballot measure passes and voters give state lawmakers the authority to change Connecticut’s absentee voting law, Davis intends to ask the legislature to ban candidates, party officials and political operatives from the absentee voting process altogether in order to prevent the types of coercion that have been alleged in Bridgeport.
She is hopeful that legal change could be enacted at the same time that lawmakers are considering how to roll out universal absentee voting.
“If this constitutional amendment passes, what will be critical is the advocacy on the other side of it with the state legislature,” Davis said. “That is the key to making this work, and our legislature has to write that into law.”
A call for more checks
Republicans would also like to see changes to the state’s absentee voting law, but they believe those changes should have been taken up by the legislature before voters were asked to expand absentee voting in this year’s election.
Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, who has been an outspoken critic of the referendum and resisted it at every step of the process, argued that he is not inherently opposed to expanding absentee voting. But he said he is unwilling to support the effort without other major changes to the state’s election laws.
“It’s not really about no-excuse absentee voting for me. I don’t really have an issue with that,” Sampson said. “What I have issue with is the failure of the majority to take seriously the concerns over the process itself.”
One of the main things Sampson and other Republicans are demanding is some type of check to help determine who is actually casting an absentee ballot.
He and Proto, the state Republican chairman, both pointed out that most of the states that have universal absentee voting, including California, Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts, also perform signature verification checks on absentee ballots or require a witness to sign an absentee ballot along with the voter.
Connecticut does not have either of those at the moment. The rules require local election officials to confirm there is a signature on the absentee ballot envelope, but they don’t check it against the signature on people’s voter registration cards.
“So states, many of which are far more liberal than Connecticut, have mechanisms in place to ensure that whoever is using mail-in voting and absentee voting are actually who they say they are,” Proto said.
Sampson used the ongoing criminal allegations in Bridgeport in October to argue in a press release that similar absentee ballot fraud is taking place throughout Connecticut.
But the only other case he cited in an interview with the CT Mirror was the 2022 conviction of Stamford’s former Democratic chairman, who was accused of fraudulently applying for absentee ballots for dozens of other people and illegally casting votes in their names.
Sampson’s allegations that absentee ballot fraud is taking place “in other Connecticut municipalities” set off a chain of recrimination between him and his Democratic colleagues.
Sen. Martin Looney and Sen. Bob Duff, the Democratic leaders of the state Senate, issued their own press release in response accusing Sampson of trying to undermine trust in the state’s elections and comparing him to former President Donald Trump, who has continued to claim without evidence that he won the 2020 election.
“Falsely asserting there is widespread voter fraud in our state is nothing but a desperate attempt to sow doubt regarding the integrity of our elections. This Trumpian falsehood serves as a local version of national rumors and baseless accusations from the Republican party,” Looney and Duff said, without mentioning the criminal complaints that prompted Sampson’s initial statement.
Advocates for expanded absentee voting argue the recent criminal charges filed against Democratic officials in Bridgeport are a sign that the state’s laws and electoral processes work.
It is now up to Connecticut’s more than 2 million registered voters to decide if they agree.
Nearly half a million of those voters have already cast a ballot ahead of the election due to early in-person voting, which the state’s electorate approved in another referendum just two years ago.