New Haven Independent

Turnout has been especially heavy in Wards 1 (Yale), 9 and 10 (East Rock), and 25 (lower Westville), according to Democratic Registrar of Voters Sharon Ferrucci. She’s guessing that turnout will be the highest the city has seen in a presidential primary since at least 1988, when Jesse Jackson energized new voters and won the New Haven vote.

By 10 a.m., 390 Democrats had already voted at Edgewood School, according to moderator Nancy Ahern. The city had delivered 400 Democratic ballots to the school, and they soon ran out. Ahern called to the Registrar of Voters starting at 9 a.m. for new ballots; she said several voters waited “a few minutes” until 500 new ballots to arrive.

Ahern said Edgewood might even run out of those; she predicted Democratic turnout could top 1,000 by the time the polls close at 8 p.m. She suggested that the Registrar of Voters office begin by handing out extra bundles of ballots to highest-voting wards based on prior turnout.

Ferrucci said the office does look at past voting patterns; she said her crew was already preparing to deliver reinforcement batches of ballots every three hours to polling spots like Edgewood School. The bags of bundled ballots “are too heavy” to deliver more at one time, she said.

Ferrucci’s office has been swamped with people wanting to vote this week. Her staff registered 370 new Democrats Monday, the last day to sign up to vote for the primary. “We had lines down the hall,” she said.

On Tuesday she fielded angry complaints from independent voters who wanted to participate in the primary. But under Connecticut law, they can’t. (Some other states allow independents to vote in party primary.)

Some aspiring voters were luckier Tuesday. “I just restored two felons,” Ferrucci reported around 12:30 p.m.

Ward 26 Update, 3:40 p.m.
This in from Leonard Honeyman:

A lonely, soggy Hillary sign kept an equally lonely, soggy Obama sign company Tuesday afternoon at the Davis Street School in Beverly Hills while a slow trickle of voters passed by, but the count on the vote-card reader inside testified that was not always the case.

A total of 560 people in New Haven’s 26th Ward had picked up ballots from the half-dozen Democrats and lone Republican who checked in voters and had cast ballots, according to the counter.

An election worker said about 1,400 people were registered with either the GOP or Democrats in the ward, meaning about 40 percent of the people eligible to vote had cast ballots, with five hours left to go before the polls close.