Thomas Breen photo
Julie Parr, outside her 116 Crown home: "I felt very disenfranchised."
Julie Parr and 27 of her Crown Street neighbors didn’t get to vote in their ward’s alder race in this month’s election, because a government mess-up sent them to the wrong polling district.
Parr was one of 28 Crown Street voters who, because of a “clerical error” by the Registrar of Voters office, were incorrectly authorized by and instructed to vote in Ward 6 rather than in their true district of Ward 7 this municipal election year.
That means that Parr and her neighbors across two different Crown Street condo buildings downtown were able to cast their ballots in a district they don’t live in, at Roberto Clemente Academy’s polling place in Ward 6, but were not able to vote in the district they do call home, at 200 Orange St.‘s polling place in Ward 7.
Ward 6 did not have a contested aldermanic election this year, but Ward 7 did, in which Democratic incumbent Alder Eli Sabin overwhelmingly won reelection against Republican challenger Dave Agosta by a margin of 489 to 24.
According to Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans and Republican Registrar of Voters Marlene Napolitano, Parr’s and her neighbors’ votes in Nov. 7’s general election do count and are valid — even though they were in the wrong spot, which the registrar’s office is now working to remedy to make sure it doesn’t happen again in future elections.
“Based on our preliminary review, it appears a clerical error was made and voters from these addresses on Crown Street were miscoded and incorrectly assigned to Ward 6 instead of Ward 7,” Evans and Napolitano said in a joint email statement provided to the Independent. “We regret and apologize for this mistake and these voters will be promptly recoded to Ward 7.”
“To date, we’ve received no other complaints of this nature,” the statement continued. “However, we encourage any voter to contact the Registrar of Voters at (203) 946‑8035 should they have any voting-related questions or concerns. In addition, the Registrar’s office will be conducting a previously planned review of our voter registration rolls to ensure that every voter is assigned to the correct municipal and legislative districts in advance of the upcoming 2024 elections.”
In a followup email, Evans stated that there are currently 10 active registered voters at 116 Crown and 18 active registered voters at 196 Crown, meaning that a total of 28 voters across these two buildings were impacted by the ward designation snafu.
So. What happened? And how did this error come to light?
116 Crown ...
... and 196 Crown, both "miscoded" into Ward 6, when in fact in Ward 7.
On Nov. 15, roughly a week after the Nov. 7 general election, Alder Eli Sabin of Downtown/East Rock’s Ward 7 sent an email to constituents flagging a potential ward-line problem with two properties in his ward.
“While talking to some voters who came to the polls last week, I realized that after redistricting, the Registrar of Voters office misclassified at least two buildings in Ward 7 and incorrectly put them on the voter rolls for Ward 6. The addresses I know of that were affected by this are 196 Crown St and 116 Crown St,” he wrote. “If you live downtown and were told to vote in Ward 6 last week or in the September primary, please check this map to make sure you voted in the right ward. If the map shows you’re in Ward 7 but you were told to vote in Ward 6, please let me know so I can make sure this gets fixed.”
Two of the voters who had reached out to Sabin with concerns were Julie Parr and Bob Bonds, who live in separate residences at the 8‑unit condo building at 116 Crown St.
116 Crown was in Ward 7 before this year’s once-a-decade redistricting process, which slightly shifted most ward lines citywide in an effort to equalize the number of residents in each ward for the decade to come. Their address remained in Ward 7 after redistricting. And yet they were told, and authorized, vote in Ward 6 and not in Ward 7 this year.
Parr, who works in fundraising for NPR, said that she first noticed something was off during the Sept. 9 Democratic primary elections.
On primary day, she went to Ward 7’s polling place at 200 Orange St., where she’s been voting for the past few years as long as she’s lived at 116 Crown St.
“I was turned away” by the pollworkers at 200 Orange, she told the Independent during a recent phone interview. She was told instead to go to Roberto Clemente Academy’s polling place at 360 Columbus Ave., a 20-minute walk away. “I was extremely surprised. Robert Clemente is not easy” to get to from her downtown home.
She wound up not voting during the primary because of the unexpected polling place shakeup.
After talking with Sabin after the primary, she figured the problem had to do with redistricting. But every time she looked at the new redistricted map, she found that her address was still in Ward 7. “I kept looking at the maps. … It didn’t make sense to me. I kept telling my friends I felt very disenfranchised.” She said her mom used to take her to the polls every election day growing up, that she votes in every election she can as an adult. She was confused and upset by the lack of clarity around why her polling place had changed, and where she had to vote.
For Nov. 7’s municipal general election, Parr went to Roberto Clemente Academy’s polling place at 360 Columbus, following the instructions she had received from pollworkers during the primary. Upon arrival, she found that she was on the list of registered active voters eligible to vote at that location. So she voted there.
The one problem was: She didn’t see Eli Sabin’s name on the ballot. Which was confusing to her, as she knew she still lived in Ward 7.
“I complained to all of my friends about it,” she said. “I’m extremely happy to hear that Eli recognized” the problem, included the message in his constituent email, and tried to figure out what went wrong.
Bob Bonds, a Yale Alumni Association employee who also lives at 116 Crown St., also voted at Ward 6’s polling place at Roberto Clemente on Nov. 7 despite his residing in Ward 7.
Bonds was alerted by the registrar’s office to vote at Roberto Clemente via a pre-Election Day mailer urging him not to forget to vote, and listing the Ward 6 location as his polling place.
“When you get a postcard from the city saying this is your polling place, you’re in Ward 6,” then you figure you’re in Ward 6, he told the Independent. And when he went to Roberto Clemente to vote on Election Day, “they did have my name and my address,” indicating he was in the right spot.
He said he found out that something might have gone wrong only after Parr emailed her neighbors after Election Day about her confusing situation.
The amount of errors found everywhere is astonishing. From the doctor office notes that are incorrect to incorrect addresses at the clerk's office, we are surrounded by what I call "distracted working"--- that is, people not paying attention to what they are doing. Solution? It is the same thing that would help our schools so much: ban use of cell phones on the job. You wanna text during your lunch or break? OK but you are not paid to surf the net or look at your social media pages. People are going to get hurt when these mistakes snowball into life threatening errors.