New Haven mayoral candidate Shafiq Abdussabur is calling on the Secretary of the State’s office to amend Connecticut’s primary election laws.
To appear on the Democratic primary ballot, candidates need to collect signatures from 5% of the city’s registered Democratic voters. That means they need 1,623.
Abdussabur, a former New Haven Police sergeant and alder, said he collected 2,700, but half of them were thrown out by the city’s Registrar of Voters.
He said they were not told which signatures were disqualified, or specifics as to why each one did not count, so his team did it themselves.
“We did our own internal audit of every single signature page that we turned in,” Abdussabur said. “Both the ones that were rejected by the registrar's office, which I believe was 27 pages, as well as the ones that were accepted. We found gross inconsistencies around the process.”
One of the inconsistencies he cited was signatures being disqualified due to illegibility.
“The law says that you don't get to determine what somebody else’s signature is — they could put x here if they wanted to,” Abdussabur said.
Abdussabur also said mistakes may have been made with the formatting of people's names when the registrar looked up whether or not they were registered Democrats.
“If you go into the Connecticut state voter database right now, and plug in Shafiq Abdussabur, I'm an unregistered voter. But if you put the dash in there (Abdus-Sabur), I come up as a registered voter.”
Abdussabur has spelled his name without a dash on his campaign materials.
His lawyer, Patricia Kane, agreed that the process needs to change.
“Legislators have to take a hard look at this system and see, does it advance democracy?” Kane said. “Does it aid candidates in getting on the ballot? Or is it just a barrier and has it set up gatekeepers?”
A judge threw out Abdussabur’s attempt to petition his way onto the ballot earlier this week. The judge cited the Purcell Doctrine, an emergency ruling by the Supreme Court in 2006 that says states should not change election rules too close to election day so they don’t cause confusion among voters.
In New Haven, Democrats had already started voting in the primary while Abdussabur was trying to sue his way onto the ballot.
Abdussabur said he will still have a ballot line for the November general election, but said it will be an uphill battle until November 7.
“This is a significant blow to our campaign, to our fundraising efforts, just in terms of mobilizing our team,” Abdussabur said.
