nothin Election Result: New Haven Can’t Count | New Haven Independent

Election Result: New Haven Can’t Count

Lemar: “We failed the voters of this city.”

(Updated 10:10 p.m.) As of 2 p.m. Wednesday, New Haven still did not know the final results of Tuesday’s elections — because the lead registrar of voters hadn’t finished counting them and said she didn’t know when she would.

Today,” the registrar, Shannel Evans, said around 12:30 p.m. when asked when her office would complete New Haven’s ballot-counting.

Asked if she knew when today,” she responded: Nope.”

Then she refused to answer more questions.

(Update: Head Moderator John Cirello said he received the full count at 8 p.m. Wednesday and forwarded all the information to the state.)

Most cities and towns, using a new system installed by the secretary of the state, had returns reported and available to the public within hours of the polls closing Tuesday night.

New Haven was instructed to get results sent via the Internet to the secretary of the state at least by midnight.

By 2 a.m., the crew gave up. Evans, the Democratic registrar and the woman in charge of the office, sent people home and told them to reconvene in the morning.

There were numerous problems in tabulating the results. The biggest, according to two of the New Haven election moderators, John Cirello and Jonathan Einhorn, centered on Ward 20 in Newhallville. They said the registrars’ counting crew overnight couldn’t get the voting results to match the number of ballots tallied. Cirello and Einhorn said they didn’t know why that happened.

Markeshia Ricks Photo

Registrar Evans.

(Ward 20 moderator Deveria Peterson told the Independent she doesn’t know what caused the problem, either. She said the polls were crowded all day with people complaining and trying to jump the long lines. She said 1,563 people voted. If they had planned better” downtown, she said, she would have had more help to process the voters. At one point later in the day Evans stopped by and helped her figure out how to break up the lists” to get voters through faster, Peterson said.)

Before going home early Wednesday, Cirello said, he sent unofficial provisional election results to the secretary of the state with the understanding that a full official version would arrive some time on Wednesday.

Secretary of the State

By 2:15 p.m. Wednesday, New Haven’s page on the official state website still showed only Unofficial” results from New Haven with just 21 of 40 precincts reporting. (Update: By 10 p.m. the full official results from all 40 precincts were posted, showing Democrat Hillary Clinton with 34,577 votes citywide, or 86.02 percent; Republican Donald Trump with 4,483 votes, or 11.15 percent; Libertarian Gary Johnson with 541 votes or 1.35 percent; and Green Jill Stein with 593 votes, or 1.48 percent. The site did not show a ward-by-ward breakdown. Such a breakdown was not available from the city, either.)

Wednesday morning at 10 a.m., all was quiet in the registrar’s office on the second floor of the 200 Orange St. office building. Staff said there was still no sign or word from Evans.

Next door in the city clerk’s office, City Clerk Michael Smart said he too was waiting on word about the vote-counting. By law, the registrar, not the clerk, is in charge of counting the ballots. Then the clerk is supposed to certify the results. Smart said he had received no results to certify.

Moderator Einhorn said he also still had no official word on the number of people who signed up and cast ballots Tuesday under the new Election Day Registration (EDR) law. When the polls closed Tuesday night he estimated the number at 1,500. He revised the estimate downward to almost 1,000 Wednesday morning. But he said he had still received no official number from the registrar’s vote-counters.

Evans was finally spotted around 12:30 p.m. Wednesday in the atrium on the second floor of City Hall. She was conducting a wedding. Afterwards she was asked for a status update. That was when she offered two words of response and walked away, refusing further answers. (The video at the top of this article shows the exchange.)

At 1:56 p.m. Wednesday, head moderator Cirello said he still hadn’t received official results from Evans to submit to the state.

A Botched Election

The Ward 7 voting line Tuesday morning.

It was the coda to a week of screw-ups by Evans, who was overseeing her first general election since being named to fill the vacant Democratic registrar of voters position in January. (She oversaw an April presidential primary, in which her office sent postcards to more than 1,000 voters directing them to the wrong polling places.)

Last week the secretary of the state’s office sent a staffer to New Haven to urge the registrars to prepare better for EDR. The state concluded that the registrars had planned for too little staff to process the crush of expected last-minute registrants. It was also concerned because New Haven’s registrars, unlike those in most other Connecticut communities, failed to participate in any of three EDR training sessions.

Both the secretary of the state and the mayor’s office swung into action, sending enough staffers so that 16 people could process registrants quickly. Still, people waited hours to sign up and vote, and at least 50 never got to.

Meanwhile, when the officials polls opened at 6 a.m. Tuesday, the moderator Evans hired for the Ward 7 station at the Hall of Records wasn’t there. And too few staffers were on hand to verify voters. Voters ended up waiting as long as two and a half hours to vote. (The registrars hire the moderators to oversee each of the city’s polling stations on Election Day.)

Police Officer Vic Fuentes delivers an emergency stash of ballots Tuesday afternoon to the Ward 10 voting station, which had run out.

Throughout the day, several polling stations ran out of ballots. Click here to read about one such instance.

That was all prelude to a long night of failing to count the results of the elections, as required by law, and then failing to make ward-by-ward results available to the public.

One result of Tuesday’s election was known before the polls even closed, because of a state law that guarantees a position for Democratic and Republican registrars whether or not people want to vote for them: Shannel Evans was elected to another terms as Democratic registrar of voters.

As for how many people voted for her, well … that detail has been taking longer to reveal.

Lemar: Change Needed

New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar complained mid-day Wednesday that he still hadn’t received official vote totals in some wards in his district. Lemar was reelected Tuesday.

He declared the registrar’s office handling of Election Day left a lot to be desired.”

We failed the voters in the city yesterday,” Lemar said during an appearance on WNHH radio’s Dateline New Haven” program. There were two-and-a-half hour lines at some of our polling locations. We ran out of ballots in others. Election Day Registration — we knew was going to be a huge bump at City Hall for 12 hours. We knew what those 12 hours would be. I don’t have results in some of my wards yet!

We have failed voters. I think it’s incumbent me as an elected representative and others across the city to highlight when there’s a failure.”

Lemar proposed that the state make the registrar of voters an appointed rather than elected position. He said that would professionalize the position and inspire more public trust in the vote-counting process.

City GOP Town Chairman Jonathan Wharton, who appeared with Lemar on Dateline,” said he isn’t sure he agrees with that proposed solution. He questioned whether bureaucrats” would do a better job.

Lemar acknowledged, as well, that people might distrust the idea of having a mayor elected from one party choosing the registrar. But he argued that the benefits of professionalization and public trust would override that concern.

Click on the above sound file to hear the full episode of WNHH’s Dateline New Haven” with Wharton and Lemar, who discussed more broadly the results of Tuesday’s national and state elections.

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