City Hall Creates Voter-Info Roadblock

The Elicker administration advised election officials to create a new barrier to people seeking voter information — advice it now says it will withdraw in the face of complaints.

People working on 2021 municipal campaigns learned of the new barrier in recent weeks when they asked to see ward voter registration lists.

In the past — as long as anyone can remember in New Haven, or in any Connecticut municipality — people simply showed up at the registrar of voters office, made the request, and immediately received the lists.

Now New Haven has started requiring citizens to file formal Freedom of Information Act requests through a new online portal to obtain the lists.

The registrar of voters office said it made that requirement in response to advice in a memo from the Corporation Counsel’s Office. The memo, released Monday night by the Elicker administration after this story originally appeared, informs the registrars they are not legally required to add the new requirement to file a formal FOI request. The memo concludes by advising the registrars to add the new requirement; the advice came as part of a broader Elicker administration effort to create a system for tracking public-document requests, with a stated goal of increased accountability. (More on that later in the story.)

The voter lists play a central role to the democratic process. They enable candidates to know who can vote.

Tomas Reyes, a former Board of Alders president and mayoral chief of staff, has been involved in New Haven campaigns for 25 years. He said he had never encountered such a rule before until Monday, when he requested a copy of the Ward 14 voter list and was told he had to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the Corporation Counsel’s Office.

“I’m still trying to find out what happened,” he said later.

GOP Town Chair John Carlson has sent several potential alder candidates to the registrars’ office in recent weeks to obtain lists. They all, too, were left empty-handed, and were told to file formal FOI requests. Under a new Elicker administration system, all requests go into a computerized tracking system to be handled in order.

Given the high volume of public requests for information, and the inability of city government to afford to employ dozens of full-time FOI specialists, that can mean waiting weeks to obtain a routine document despite the hard work of staffers to process cases.

“I thought it was bizarre,” Carlson said. ​“I ran three prior campaigns. This has never been an issue. You have to do a Freedom of Information request to get a voting list? You’re adding one more hurdle to running for office. It’s unnecessary.

“I’m trying to get some candidates to run. The last thing I need is to make it more difficult for them to run.”

Whether or not the Elicker administration order is out and out illegal, it at least raises questions, according to Thomas Hennick, public information officer of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.

“I know of no other municipalities that require a requester to make a request for such records directly to the corporation counsel’s office,” Hennick told the Independent. ​“Different towns and cities have different protocols for handling FOI requests, but technically, under FOI, requests for public records should be made to the agency that has those records.”

Hennick said the commission would ​“have an issue” if ​“the routing of FOI requests through another office unnecessarily delayed access to the records for the requester.”

“The voter file is a public document and should be accessible to the public,” said secretary of the state spokesperson Gabe Rosenberg.

Corp Counsel ​“Clarifies”

Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans told the Independent she didn’t make the rule. She said her office had received the FOI directive from the corporation counsel’s office.

She wrote an email to the corporation counsel’s office on Feb. 24 seeking clarification.

“I believe it was said to us that everyone, including co-chairs and alders, had to put in a request if they wanted information. As we stated in our budget all elected officials and qualified candidates get free lists. Please correct me if I’m wrong but I thought we were informed that they now have to do FOIA as well,” Evans wrote.

Republican Registrar of Voters Marlene Napolitano added in an email the next day seeking ​“a complete clarification.” She, too, reported understanding that requests should go through the FOI portal.

“I’m getting backlash from my Town Chairman and Town Committee Members asking for all kinds of information,” Napolitano wrote. ​“When I state the process of going through FOIA I get the same type of questions that Shannel has indicated …

“If the process is the process can we get a complete clarification on that process and an understanding of what information it applies to? Also, that it applies to all who are asking.

“At this time my understanding is it applies to all requests except the reports that Mr. Lou prints every month and are mailed out from our office.”

Here’s what Deputy Corporation Counsel Roderick Williams wrote back to Evans and Napolitano on March 1:

Marlene and Shannell,

I think this has become more confusing than it needs to be. The FOIA portal was created to try to make things easier for you. First of all, any request that you receive to provide any documents (that does not come from a City employee for City business) is a request under the FOIA, even if it is not in writing. There is no change in the rules and no thing that anyone voted on. My office created a portal that funnels FOIA complaints as a way to try to manage the process. We encourage people to use it.

For any recurring documents that you give to people/organizations by routine, you can continue to do that. You can also provide documents to alders and candidates and your town committees or whoever else asks you for documents without putting it through the portal. We do advise that you do use the portal because it creates a record and makes it easier to defend FOIA violation claims in the future, but you can use your discretion.

I hope this helps. Please advise if this does not answer your questions.

As of Monday, Evans said she still had the clear understanding the corporation counsel was advising her office to have people file formal requests through the portal in order to obtain the records.

Advice Updated

In response to an inquiry from the Independent, city Corporation Counsel Patricia King said Monday afternoon that the advice to use the portal will be rescinded.

“We’re not going to make that recommendation for those requests any more,” King said. ​“We’re going to go back to just giving out the records the way they did in the past.”

The intent of the new portal is to track the many FOI requests coming into the city in order to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks, King said. ​“We never meant for the portal to slow anybody down.”

The Elicker administration’s creation of the system last year drew both praise and concerns. The argument for the new system is that it has created a more formal process through which applicants can track their requests and know whom to pester in the case of delays. The argument against the new system is that it creates another layer of bureaucracy that leads to routine requests becoming written requests that take weeks or months to fulfill. One alternative would be to train staffers in all city offices to immediately turn over public documents as envisioned in the state FOI law without fear of repercussions from the mayor’s office, rather than create an insurmountable new load of work for overwhelmed city lawyers to have to comb through.