Anatomy Of A Flawed Election

At 4 a.m. on Election Day, a bleary-eyed group of poll workers walked into the Hartford town and city clerk's office to check the last of more than 1,200 absentee voters off the voter registration lists.

The task was routine; the time and day troublesome.

The job, crucial to ensuring that absentee voters couldn't show up Tuesday at city polling places and vote again, should have been mostly finished days earlier, city and state officials said.

The last-minute scramble, completed less than an hour before polls were to open, was one in a series of lapses that led to some polling places not having registration lists when voting was scheduled to begin at 6 a.m. As a result of the failure, voters were turned away, a judge ordered the extension of hours at two polling places and the state's chief election official filed a complaint with the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Interviews with poll workers, city employees, volunteers and state officials, as well as a review of internal emails obtained by The Courant, provide some insight into what went wrong:

Democratic Registrar Olga Vazquez knew Hartford was behind schedule in printing the voter lists six days before Election Day and employees in the city clerk's office were unclear about when the registrars would complete the lists as late as the day before the election, city emails reveal.

City election officials didn't participate in any of the pre-election conference calls held by the Secretary of the State's office and never submitted a list of moderators with contact numbers, which slowed a proper response Tuesday morning, state records show.

Interviews show that the problems were widespread.

One deputy head moderator told The Courant that, for the first time, moderators were forced to deliver lists to polling places because they were not ready the night before. Joseph Wilkerson said he saw Working Families Party Registrar Urania Petit send workers home by about 8 p.m. even though the absentee ballot check-offs weren't complete and none of the voter lists were ready for moderators to take.

Wilkerson acknowledged leaving boxes of lists in his car Tuesday morning until after 6 a.m. so he could deal with voter machine problems at one polling place.

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Anatomy Of A Flawed Election