Merrill Failure: 20,000 Voters Will Not Receive Absentee Ballots. Town Clerks Will Try to Solve Primary Crisis. Unglued, Too. Ballots May Fall Out of Envelopes.
Town clerks across Connecticut Monday afternoon received an alarming message from their association leader, stalwart Anna Posniak, Windsor’s town clerk. Secretary of the State Denise Merrill has failed to mail absentee ballots to 20,000 voters who applied for them to participate in the August 11th statewide party primaries. Merrill has told they must find the voters and send them absentee ballots.
The fiasco is the latest in the mess Merrill has made in the expansion of voting by absentee ballots during the global health crisis. Merrill’s deputy is Scott Bates, who last year brought disrepute on the Connecticut Port Authority.
The crisis calls for the intervention of Governor Ned Lamont. He authorized through an executive order the new system that is becoming an exercise in voter suppression.
Here’s Posniak’s code red warning to town clerks:
Good afternoon,
Elections – Update 08/03/2020
I must alert all Town Clerks that immediate action is needed.
It was brought to my attention this afternoon that Secretary of the State’s office did not send absentee ballot exports for last week to mail house. In my conversation with Ted at 2:45 p.m. today, he stated that it was clear that SOTS needed to end ties with the mail house as they were not able process the absentee ballots in timely manner.
Late this afternoon, Ted provided us with an Excel spreadsheet that indicates the exact ballots that were not sent to mail house. The Excel spreadsheet contains over 20,000 ballots statewide that were not sent out by SOTS. You will need to isolate the voters from your town. You MUST resend each voter on the Excel spreadsheet an absentee ballot immediately.
To process the applications for a second time, you will look up each voter in the “Absentee Ballot” screen.
You will click on the select button to select the record that was not processed by mail house. You will change the following:
SERIAL NO. – update to the serial number with the serial from the ED-8 envelope
DATE ISSUED – enter reissuing date
Click “UPDATE” and then generate labels for the ED-8 envelope that you will use to mail the ballot to the voter.
ISSUE TYPE: can remain “MAIL” as SOTS is no longer using the services of the mail house to process the ballots.
The Secretary has created a major problem that Town Clerks are now left to fix with the primary only one week away. Additionally, I am extremely irate that Secretary Merrill, Deputy Secretary Bates and Elections Division Director, Ted Bromley, did not mention this during our 10 a.m. conference call today. In a phone call last Thursday, Ted had mentioned this was a possibility. However, Ted assured me that he would get back to me if they decided to send the data back to the Town Clerks for reprocessing. Had this information been given to us on Friday, I know that 169 Town Clerks would have worked over the weekend to get those ballots to their voters. I am extremely concerned for the voters in our large cities as this neglect by SOTS may disenfranchise their vote next Tuesday. If you unable to reprocess all of last week’s volume of applications in addition to this week’s requests, please reach out to me and we will try to get you some assistance from others towns with lowe r volumes to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised.
Additionally, I have been informed that the sides of some inner envelopes have not been properly glued shut by the manufacturer; as a result, the voter’s ballot could slip out of the inner envelope while the town clerk is processing the returns into CVRS. This issue is not related to the voter accidentally slicing open the envelope. It is due to poor quality control at the mail house. Please be on the lookout for envelopes that are not sealed on the side. Please tape the defective inner envelopes shut.
Stay healthy. Stay CTCA strong.
Anna Posniak
CTCA President