The last absentee ballot dropped off on Tuesday arrived at the New Haven City Hall of Records by bike. With a minute to 8 p.m., the voter threw down her bike and practically dived at the ballot box as City Clerk Michael Smart came by to lock up.
Smart told her to take her time as she dropped the ballot into the slot. Her vote in the primaries, he assured her as he emptied and locked the ballot boxes, will be counted.
“That was ballot box number two,” Smart said. “We took the last of the ballots out for the 8 o’clock count, locked it up, and we’ll go do ballot box number one.”
Voters had to drop off ballots or postmark them by Tuesday at 8 p.m. But the deadline for registrars and town clerks to count the votes is Thursday night. When polls closed on Tuesday, the handoff in New Haven from city clerk to registrar began, and with it a few long days of counting.
From Smart’s hands, the ballots were off to the second floor, where Kevin Arnold, head moderator for the City of New Haven, went to collect them from May Reed, assistant city clerk. Arnold is the one who will submit the final numbers to the secretary of the state’s office.
The two talked and joked about the long night ahead. Then Arnold asked for an estimate.
"How many do you think are left, roughly -- I mean I’m not gonna hold you to it but ...”
Reed responded, “Still over a thousand, another thousand.” And Arnold added, “Plus what we pick out, what gets delivered tomorrow and Thursday morning.”
Gov. Ned Lamont signed an executive order Monday allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Tuesday and delivered by Thursday to be counted. And that meant a slight change of schedule for the registrar’s office last night.
Arnold said the last-minute change might work in his favor.
“Actually, it maybe saved us a couple hours ’cause we’ll be able to start earlier. We can’t start [counting] them until the polls are closed, because the procedure is the check list,” Arnold said, referring to the paper lists at each of the 21 polls around New Haven. “If someone goes and votes in person at a polling location and they also submitted an absentee ballot, we can’t process absentee ballots until we get that checklist back to make sure they did not, in fact, vote in person.”
Arnold said those who double up may not intentionally commit voter fraud, but they may have voted twice fearing that their absentee ballot would not be received with mail delays caused by Tropical Storm Isaias.
With the extra days to double-check, Arnold and the registrars didn’t have to wait until much later to start.
This after-hours counting is not typical. Neither is the number of ballots. New Haven officials estimated the absentee ballot number at the end of Tuesday at just shy of 5,000 -- that’s out of 9,000 requests.
Reed summed it up as she handed over the 1,100 ballots that came in Tuesday alone.
”It’s just, it’s a lot. Absentee ballots of this volume is a lot,” she said.
And officials said they expect to do this again in November, but with more absentee ballots to count.
Ali Oshinskie is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.
