(Originally published 5 p.m. Wednesday.) Twenty hours after the polls closed, the city’s registrar of voters released election results showing Democrat Dan Malloy blowing his Republican opponent out of the water by 18,613 votes in New Haven.
Malloy beat Tom Foley by 22,298 to 3,685 votes, a ratio of 6 to 1 in New Haven, counting absentee ballots.
That’s a far bigger margin than the 16,589 to 8,274 vote by which New Haven’s own Mayor John DeStefano prevailed in town when he ran for governor in 2006. DeStefano beat Gov. M. Jodi Rell by only 8,315 votes that year.
After a series of mishaps and slow counting, New Haven was one of the last towns in the state to report its results. The results were released shortly after 4 p.m. — as Democrat Malloy was on statewide TV already announcing his transition team. The secretary of the state had declared him the “unofficial” victor; she couldn’t make a sounder declaration because New Haven and Bridgeport, among others, couldn’t give her official numbers.
Click here to read the ward-by-ward results. Note that some Malloy votes occur in the Working Families column, or a column marked “unknown,” which means that the voter marked down Malloy in both the “Working Families” and “Democrat” row. (So you have to add up numbers in three columns.)
Ward 25 in Westville had the highest turnout, 64 percent. Note that in some places, the ward vote tallies don’t exactly reflect voters in that ward: For example, Ward 3 residents were sent to three different polling places Tuesday, meaning their votes were counted under other wards’ totals.
Turnout this year fell short of turnout in 2006, when local candidates DeStefano and U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman were on the ballot.
New Haven’s voter turnout in 2006 was 48 percent.
This year, 43 percent of New Haven voters turned out to the polls. However there were more voters this year than in 2006, because of the flood of new registrations coinciding with Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Around 1,000 more people voted Tuesday than in 2006.
Tuesday’s turnout didn’t reach the burst of voter enthusiasm in 2008, when cities boosted the nation’s first black president into office. That year, 67 percent of voters cast ballots. But the number of voters was high for a mid-term election in the modern era.
With only two-thirds of the number of voters as 2008, the city still encountered significant problems handling crowds and counting votes.
In East Rock, where Wards 9 and 10 were combined at the Wilbur Cross High School, some voters left the polls without voting because of long lines.
In Newhallville, election officials had to hand-feed 734 paper ballots from Ward 21 into a new counter. The machine malfunctioned at the polls.
As late as 1 p.m. Wednesday, the Registrar of Voters Office was still hand-counting ballots that had write-in candidates on them.
New Haven was one of the last towns in the state to report its results.
A person familiar with the process suggested it could be sped up by having more help. The vote-counting is done by members of the voting registrar’s office, in their 60s and 70s, who start working at 4 or 5 a.m. They answer phones all day from frantic people trying to vote. Around 10 p.m., they sit down to tabulate the votes. That means tossing out absentee ballots of people who later voted at the polls, counting the absentee ballots, and putting all the final figures onto a grid. By midnight, staff are exhausted. The person suggested the city hire a team of younger folks to start work at 10 p.m. counting the votes.
“This is the 21st century,” the observer remarked: the city shouldn’t have to wait until late Wednesday to find out how New Haveners cast their votes.
In another surprise for Malloy Tuesday, in the East Shore’s Ward 18, Malloy beat Foley 807 – 543 on the machines. That’s the neighborhood where Mayor John DeStefano grew up — a ward he lost in his 2006 gubernatorial campaign. Gov. M. Jodi Rell (an incumbent who was far more popular than Foley) beat DeStefano by 826 to 639 votes that year.
Unbelievable numbers! It is a beautiful day in New Haven and the East Shore! Yes we will when appropriate and for the betterment of our city and state.
Elaine Braffman
East Shore resident