Bridgeport’s registered Democrats will head to the polls on Tuesday, January 23 for a redo of the mayoral primary election. And it may not be the last election in a race that has seen serious accusations of absentee ballot fraud.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Andrew Brown to discuss his article, “Ganim, Gomes in Bridgeport election again. What’s changed?,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: Hello, Andrew. You say absentee ballot abuse has been a major factor in the ongoing contest between Mayor Joe Ganim and challenger John Gomes. Is that why you decided to dig deeper into how the AB system works in Bridgeport?
AB: Yeah, we've been looking since September at how political operatives in Connecticut's largest city essentially use the absentee balloting process and how they influence voters who want to use that process. So it's been a huge issue in the past five months over whether the entire or most of the absentee balloting system in Bridgeport has a problem, as far as I guess, alleged fraud and other problems related to that.
WSHU: We've had a court judgment on this. The court found that there was evidence of absentee ballot stuffing in the September primary. And again in November, Ganim won the general election by the absentee ballot vote. And here, leading up to this, we have a concerted effort by both camps to garner as many absentee ballots as possible. I believe you say about 6,000 absentee ballot applications have been given out in Bridgeport. How does that compare with other cities? And why, even after we've had a court judgment, are they still doubling down on trying to get as many absentee ballots as possible?
AB: So this election is kind of different. This court-ordered primary. The 6,000 absentee applications, which are the forms that voters fill out in order to receive an absentee ballot, that's not as many as were taken out in September, for instance, there were actually like 30,000 absentee applications taken out in that election.
WSHU: And how many people actually voted eventually, in that election? I don’t think there were 30,000 people.
AB: No, so there were over 4,000 absentee ballots actually sent to voters, around 2,600 of those were then returned, meaning they were cast with local election officials. This time around, we're looking at a lower number, it's well over 1,000 at this point, ballots that have actually been cast ahead of this election, but that's still around half at least as of late last week, whenever the most recent numbers were available compared to September. So you're going to see fewer people voting absentee in this court-ordered primary, but it still could result in a huge shift in the election because this is probably going to be a far lower turnout election as far as people that show up on Election Day, which is why both campaigns have devoted the past three weeks to essentially prodding or pushing or encouraging their supporters to vote absentee.
WSHU: It's been three weeks because the window was shortened by the court judgment. It shortened the window of absentee ballot availability for this election, right?
AB: That's correct. The judge who ruled in the case that was filed by John Gomes and then ultimately crossed out September’s primary decided to set up rules that absentee applications were only available for three weeks starting in late December. And that's a huge shift from the September primary. Operatives essentially had a four-month run-up to sign people up to vote absentee. For the numbers, while reduced from September, they're still quite impressive for the timeframe in which this has been accomplished. They've been pounding the pavement out there to get people to vote absentee in the past three weeks.
WSHU: And that's that's both campaigns, both the Ganim campaign and the Gomes campaign.
AB: Yes, both campaigns had either campaign staff or surrogates, like city council members, in Bridgeport taking out hundreds of absentee applications in an effort to sign up as many people as possible. Now, you have to remember that those are votes they know they have in hand, because they can see the AB report of who submitted a ballot back to the clerk's office. So they can get a relatively decent count prior to election day of how many votes they might be able to rely on before the polls even close.
WSHU: Now, the 138th District, why does it seem as if there's more effort in that district than in other districts?
AB: There could be several reasons. I think the first focus would be that there are several public housing facilities in that district, low-income housing, as well as elderly housing units. And it's clear from the information we reviewed from the September primary that both campaigns focus their attention on getting elderly Bridgeport residents to sign up to vote absentee. And they do that for obvious reasons, right, because those people are less likely to go out to the polls.
The other reason is that the players in that district are rather prolific at getting these absentee applications out. You have Councilwoman Maria Pereira, on John Gomes’ side who represents that district, has been in the business of signing people up for absentee ballots for years. And then you had her opponents in the most recent election who contested her city council seat who are also out there in that same district soliciting the same people for absentee votes. So there's just a lot of competition there. You know, we talked to voters there who said they'd see three or four people during an election cycle coming around asking them to sign an absentee application. That's not unheard of. So it is the most contested battleground in the city of Bridgeport.
WSHU: The secretary of the state has election monitors assigned to Bridgeport. How has that affected what has gone on in the past three weeks?
AB: The election monitors have been picking up ballots from the drop boxes and recording which ballots come in via the drop box or via the U.S. mail, instructing the Bridgeport town clerk and the Bridgeport registrar voters offices about best practices as far as handling this absentee balloting process. But at the end of the day, they only have so much control. The alleged fraud that took place in September didn't happen in City Hall. It didn't happen in the clerk's office or the registered voters office. The alleged fraud occurred on the street at people's homes as campaign operatives went around, and allegedly helped people to fill out ballots, or collected their ballots once they were filled out and deposited them in the drop box, which is illegal in Connecticut.
So whether that activity is still going on, it's hard to say. The election monitors don't have eyes and ears everywhere in the city. So they've just been doing the best job they can at trying to police the rules. And the documents that they do have control of what can be said pretty clearly, is that everything that's gone on in the past five months has not dissuaded people within the campaigns from continuing to essentially push this very aggressive tactic of signing people up for absentee ballot.
WSHU: And well, you know, the election in Bridgeport, it might not be final, they might still be coming back for another general election in February, depending on the outcome of this election. So those workers, I'm sure, will still be added again.
AB: Yes, I don't think voters in Bridgeport should be ready at the end of this month to say that they have a mayor. I think there will be a lot of court drama left and like you said, potentially another general election in February.
