In this second segment of a 4-part interview, municipal lawyers Michael Collins and Richard Roberts discuss the legal issues they have observed in Connecticut’s past elections, including the mailing of absentee ballots in the August 2020 Primary Election. The full text of their responses is below.
What legal issues specifically involving mail-in voting or absentee ballots have you observed or helped resolve in the past?
Mike: And this does get back to some of the very things that Rich was talking about, starting with the circulation of petitions to qualified people to run for office, and the application process to get absentee ballots, and then the casting of those ballots. Many times, political candidates will have a variety of volunteers working for them, and sometimes those volunteers have not been well-versed in the rules that apply to those various things. And that’s what has led to problems that I’ve seen. Folks not dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in the various petitions, applications, that type of thing. The controversy in some of the tabulations, again, normally in my experience have surfaced themselves in the very close elections, where either there’s a mandatory recount or there has been some claim that there’s been an abuse of the system which has led to the need to go back and look at all those absentee ballots on an individual basis, and it’s a time-consuming process.
Rich: I think my experience has been similar to Mike’s, just anecdotally with the primary we had last month here, there were a number of people who were unhappy about the timing by which they received the absentee ballots themselves, as far as being close to the election and a long time after the application had been submitted. And I did hear of a few people’s ballots who were mailed late enough that they had already left on vacation by the time they were being delivered to teir homes. Frankly, I don’t think in any circumstance that I’m aware of, that issue was large enough to have swayed the outcome of the election, but it certainly played into the fears that had been swirling around as far as the seamlessness of the process.
Mike: And I think that particular issue might have been exacerbated by the fact that as far as I’m aware, for the first time a third-party vendor was used in the dissemination of the ballots, and I think that could fairly be said to have impacted that problem.
Rich: Right, and the transition from the responsibility of that third-party vendor to the town clerks may not have been well-communicated at the time.