More than 300,000 voters in Connecticut have already cast their ballots for the Nov. 5 presidential election, but some are still suspicious of the process.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas to discuss his article, “Voter fraud in elections? Partisanship divides CT and the nation,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Mark's story here.
WSHU: Hello, Mark. Voter fraud has been a major issue since the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016. The Connecticut Mirror surveyed voters on how this plays out in Connecticut in the run-up to this year's election. What did you find?
MP: We found that there are two very different tracks regarding trust in democracy and trust in how our elections are maintained. And there is a huge partisan divide in faith in whether or not our votes will be counted accurately and fairly on November 5. The short answer is that Democrats are very confident, and Republicans are not so. There is in Connecticut a 66-point difference between Democrats and Republicans and their confidence that the votes nationally will be fairly counted in Connecticut. There's more faith among Republicans that it will be done accurately [in CT], but there's still a huge difference. Almost all Democrats say they're confident the votes in Connecticut will be counted fairly—only half of the Republicans.
WSHU: Now, in Connecticut, we've had issues of voter fraud in Bridgeport that have been major national stories. These stories have actually been picked up by Republicans nationally to illustrate the incidence of voter fraud. How has that affected the perception of people in Connecticut itself, between Republicans and Democrats?
MP: The poll didn't specifically explore that, but I think it's fair to say that it's played a role, as well as President Trump's consistent claims that voter fraud is widespread and that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. So, you know, one quick point: voter fraud is real. Nobody really has ever credibly suggested that it's a myth. The question is, is it scalable? So, in Bridgeport, the latest scandal involved the handling of absentee ballots. So nobody has proven that these are actually fraudulent ballots or that ballots have been stolen. But the issue there was what we call ballot harvesting.
Connecticut has very strict rules as to who can deliver an absentee ballot, and that is really the law that is quite clearly been broken in Bridgeport, there is video evidence of campaign workers depositing ballots into the drop boxes, and you know, that raises questions of whether there was undue influence of the people who filled out those ballots. But again, that is a different problem from what Donald Trump and others had promoted regarding the 2020 election. You know, there were allegations that the states that used Dominion voting systems machines somehow were actually flipping votes from Donald Trump in 2020 to Joe Biden. Those allegations have been roundly debunked, and Fox News has paid a significant penalty for reporting them as true. They paid $787 million in damages to settle a defamation suit by Dominion.
The other thing people should be aware of is that even in those states where the Dominion machines were used in most of those states, the machines don't record the vote. The machines produce a clean paper ballot that the voter then reviews and uses. So this cycle, the only state that I could find that still relies on machines to record the votes is Louisiana, in the other 49 United States, there's a paper ballot involved, whether it's filled out by the voter with a pen or whether it's produced by a ballot marking machine, as is the case in places like Georgia.
WSHU: An interesting thing that I saw in your story is that Connecticut is the home to Fight Voter Fraud, a nonprofit that was set up to go after perceptions of, well, basically to go after alleged voter fraud. Can you tell us a little bit about this organization?
MP: Sure, they've been around for about five years, and they now have a budget of well over a million dollars. What they do is crunch data. They will compare the voter rolls in different states, looking for duplicates, looking for evidence that perhaps a voter had voted in more than one place, and looking for evidence of votes being cast by people who were dead. The State Elections Enforcement Commission has investigated, you know, many of their complaints, and they have repeatedly found that what Fight Voter Fraud has found was record-keeping issues. In the case of apparently dead people voting, what elections enforcement found is that the wrong name was checked off at the polls. So again, there's been a lot of pushback from elections enforcement to Fight Voter Fraud. They have a very low opinion of the Elections Enforcement Commission, saying they're just not nearly aggressive enough to explore these things.
There's no question that there are voters who remain on the rolls for years after they move or, in some cases after they die. But that does not mean people are going to the polls in person, impersonating somebody who has moved or has died. That's a felony. It's a felony in Connecticut, and I believe it's a felony in every other state. The real issue with fraud tends to be how people filling out absentee ballots are pressured. There have been cases in Connecticut of absentee ballots being stolen. There was a democratic town chair in Stanford who was convicted of fraudulently obtaining absentee ballots in the names of real voters. He was caught because of the system. In that case, it did work.
Some of those voters, when they went to the polls, were told, well, they had voted by absentee ballot. Those absentee ballots were taken out of the count, and the real voters were allowed to cast provisional ballots until it could be straightened out. So, you know, there's a case where, again, there was fraud, but ultimately the system worked. The fraud was discovered, and the legitimate voters were allowed to vote.
WSHU: So we don't have situations where people who are not citizens voting are being bused in from across the border?
MP: No. And that's really been one of the allegations that Trump and some of his supporters have made about the system. I will say it is an imperfect system. There is no question about that. However, to this point of trying to steal a presidential election, the United States does not have one single election system. Even the state of Connecticut doesn't. The elections are run by the municipality. So in Connecticut, it's our 169 different elections we report at the end of the day, the cities and towns report the results electronically, but those machines are not connected to the internet. You cannot hack into those machines to change the numbers. That is, you know, one of the biggest and most basic protections is that you have paper ballots and a paper trail. So if there's a recount, you can actually do a hand count of those ballots, if necessary, if there are inconsistencies found in the number of people who showed up to the votes to the polls and the number of votes cast.
WSHU: So there's a verifiable system in place.
MP: Yes. And you know, many years ago, when Connecticut got rid of the mechanical lever machines, Connecticut did look at what I would call an ATM-type machine that would record your votes electronically. Ultimately, they opted not to do that, and they went to a system of paper ballots that are counted by optical scanners. Well, scanning machines are now quite old, and Connecticut is in the process of replacing them. They have picked a new model that will be tested this time and in scattered places, but it will be in two years.
WSHU: Those are the fast scanners. They're much faster than the system that we have now.
MP: Yes, and one question: Will they be able to record early votes in a more normal way? In other words, you put your ballot in, and it's counted. The machines we have now cannot do that. They cannot basically keep going for the 14 days of early voting. So now we have a very cumbersome system of early voting where the ballots are placed in envelopes and sealed, and they will be unsealed and scanned on election day. And one of the concerns this year is how long it will take to open all those ballots and scan them in.
WSHU: So basically, they'll be scanned by the election workers on Election Day.
MP: Yes, not by the voter. The voter just puts the ballot in the envelope, and it's sealed. It's similar to absentee ballots, how they've been handled for years, and again, having to open 1000s of envelopes at the polls, and these are done with supervision from both parties. Again, there are checks and balances, but it is going to be a cumbersome and time-consuming task, so I'm not sure we will have complete election results by Tuesday, Nov. 5. I think it's going to be the next day.
