By Chris Powell
According to those who supervise Connecticut’s elections, voter fraud is not a problem in the state — or at least not outside Bridgeport, where questions of honesty in elections often arise.
Last week the state Elections Enforcement Commission began investigating a complaint that a worker for the campaign of a candidate for a Democratic nomination for state representative in Bridgeport stole a voter’s absentee ballot. After two recounts and litigation, the primary appears to have been decided by just two votes. The litigation continues.
But the bigger election scandal last week was the conviction in Superior Court of Stamford’s former Democratic chairman, John Mallozzi, on 28 felony counts involving absentee ballot fraud in the 2015 city election. Mallozzi plans to appeal.
However the Bridgeport and Stamford cases are resolved, they suggest that Connecticut should take more seriously the threat of voter fraud.
Just because Donald Trump complained of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and then failed to document it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen more often than people think. After all, complaints of voter fraud were considered perfectly legitimate when Democrats made them after Trump’s election in 2016. (Those complaints were not documented either.)
Additionally, no one in authority in Connecticut has ever looked very hard for voter fraud, though the voter rolls in some municipalities are not updated as often as they should be and though the state has at least two “sanctuary cities” — New Haven and Hartford — that obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law and issue identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.
Are illegal immigrants voting in Connecticut?
It’s plausible but nobody checks. Connecticut law makes citizenship a prerequisite for enrollment as a voter, but the state’s enrollment process does not require documentation of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport. People registering to vote need only to claim that they are citizens. Registrars don’t ask for proof.
As the Bridgeport and Stamford cases involve abuse of absentee ballots, they are reminders that the less Connecticut requires voting to be done in person and the more it allows voting by absentee ballot, the greater the potential for fraud will be.
Election security can be assured only by in-person voting that requires presentation of valid identification, preferably photo identification, and by a registration process requiring proof of citizenship.
This doesn’t mean that Connecticut should reject early voting, for which a state constitutional amendment will be on the ballot in the Nov. 8 election. But early voting should be in-person voting at town halls or other official locations, not more voting by absentee ballot. Early voting by absentee ballot will be an embossed invitation to fraud.
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Good for the governors of border states Texas, Florida, and Arizona for sending illegal immigrants and asylum seekers north to “sanctuary” cities and states, giving those jurisdictions a taste of their own poisonous medicine. The border states long have been overwhelmed by the federal government’s failure to control the borders and fairly resent the “sanctuary” crowd’s encouragement of illegal immigration.
So now Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and even Martha’s Vineyard are being rudely confronted with the burden of supporting thousands of new arrivals who compete for already strained local resources and housing.
Consistent with this country’s ideals, its immigration law is extremely liberal and small-d democratic and should remain that way. But the Biden administration’s policy of open borders has caused anarchy.
So maybe the political mischief of the border-state governors is the only way to persuade the Democratic Party, which rules those “sanctuary” cities and states as well as the federal government, that controlling the borders is urgent and that the country shouldn’t admit more people than it can assimilate in an orderly way.
Connecticut is among the “sanctuary” states, and now the airport in its most self-righteous “sanctuary” city, New Haven, has nonstop flights with six cities in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis should take note.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 