nothin Cops Pulled Vote-Counter Out Of Bed | New Haven Independent

Police Pulled
Vote-Counter Out Of Bed

Thomas MacMillan Photo

Cataniapizighelli (at right in photo) back at work counting ballots Thursday night.

(Updated. Originally published Nov. 4 11:03 p.m.) Julie Cataniapizighelli went to bed Wednesday night exhausted, convinced that she and other vote-counters had finished their job. The next afternoon a cop came to her house and ordered her back to work. The state of Connecticut was waiting.

Cataniapizighelli, a 48-year-old Hospice CNA, was one of the vote counters at the center of fast-unfolding controversies in the city of Bridgeport Thursday night. The too-close-to-call gubernatorial election was coming down to the official vote count in Bridgeport — a vote count that went horribly awry.

I was woken up by police officers,” Cataniapizighelli remarked as she resumed reviewing tally sheets in hopes of letting the public know whether Democrat Dan Malloy or Republican Tom Foley had won Tuesday’s election for governor. (Read about that here.) The outcome in Bridgeport, the last uncounted community in Connecticut, will determine whether Malloy, as expected, gains enough votes to overcome a small lead Foley has otherwise amassed.

Cataniapizighelli has been the Deputy Head Moderator for Bridgeport elections for 30 years, since she turned old enough to vote. It’s more than just a biannual ritual for her — she was born on election day 48 years ago. She held that same position for Tuesday’s election.

Starting Tuesday morning, Cataniapizighelli worked 40 hours straight. She and her colleagues had extra work to do. Bridgeport had ordered too few ballots for election day; the city ran out. Thousands of facsimile ballots were photocopied; those ballots couldn’t be scanned into machines. So it was taking a lot longer to count them than usual.

In fact, according to Bridgeport Republican Registrar of Voters Joe Borges, the counters were at a loss. They were scared to touch the ballots. No one trained them to count like that,” he said. In a typical election, a precinct worker would hand-count maybe five or 10 ballots, if, say, a machine malfunctioned. Now precincts had as many as 500.

Still, the work got done. Or so Cataniapizighelli thought when she went home at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, having gone almost two days without sleep.

At home, she took a long bath and poked around online, but was so wound up that she didn’t get to sleep until 4 a.m.

She was still asleep hours later at 2 p.m. Thursday when was awakened by dogs barking and a siren out in the yard. She went to her front door in her nightgown and found her fellow election worker Patricia Howard at the door, with a cop in the yard. The Secretary of State has ordered you in,” Howard told her.

The cops wanted to drive her to McLevy Hall, the government building housing the registrar of voters office. Instead Cataniapizighelli threw on some clothes and got a ride from her husband, who’s a Fairfield cop.

Registrar Borges had sent the police to fetch both her and coworker Brenda Young. Borges hadn’t been able to reach them. He had reached the other workers.

Officials had decided to restart the count.

They had previously believed their job was done on Wednesday night. They were about to send the official numbers to the secretary of the state, according to Borges.

Then we found mistakes,” he said. The count didn’t look right … For a whole precinct, it looked low.” With workers having been confused about hand-counting, and having been awake for so long, it made sense that they might have erred. So the registrars decided to start all over. They were continuing the task late into Thursday night.

Ready To Pop

Espinosa with her stack of 335 un-counted ballots.

A different kind of confusion, and a different kind of pressure, were weighing on Amy Espinosa and her niece. Espinosa isa 40-year-old case manager at the hospital in Bridgeport.

She and her neice served, respectively, as moderator and assistant moderator of the John F. Kennedy Campus School polling station.

Espinosa’s niece is pregnant, ready to pop any minute, according to Borges. He had arranged for an extra worker to assist the aunt and niece at JFK just in case the niece went into labor on election day.

Tuesday night, after the polls closed Espinosa dropped off a sealed bag of 335 photocopied ballots at the registrars’ office. She was exhausted; her niece wasn’t feeling well. Espinosa felt uncomfortable in counting the ballots,” according to Democratic registrar Santa Ayala.

The pair was both too tired and too scared” to count the ballots, Borges said. They also thought somebody else was supposed to hand-count them. So they left the bag and went home.

They didn’t know the process,” Borges said. They did everything right. It was just unusual circumstances.”

But officials didn’t tell people about that bag. And they didn’t count the ballots inside. Come Thursday night, the Foley campaign discovered that the bag had never been opened. No one had ever counted those ballots, not even in the first run Tuesday through Wednesday night. Foley called for state police to impound the ballots.

Instead, Espinosa and her niece (left to right in photo) came to McLevy Hall Thursday evening after she saw a TV news report about the bag she had deposited. She cut the seal off the bag after making sure her moderator number matched the number on the seal. The crew started counting the ballots over the Foley campaign’s objections. (Read about that here.) Most of the votes ended up going to Democrat Malloy.

Counting the 335 ballots in the bag took over three and a half hours. Afterward, as a Bridgeport police sergeant escorted Espinoza and her niece to their car, Espinoza explained what had happened on Tuesday night.

They wanted me to count ballots and I refused,” Espinoza said. I didn’t know how.”

She said she hadn’t been trained to count ballots. I don’t feel comfortable touching ballots.”

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