Connecticut shouldn’t aspire to be more like Bridgeport

By Chris Powell

Another Democratic primary for mayor of Bridgeport was held last week, and predictably enough it produced another absentee ballot scandal. 

Once again, as with the previous primary, in 2019, Mayor Joe Ganim lost the in-person vote but prevailed overwhelmingly in the absentee ballots, narrowly winning renomination. But this time dramatic surveillance video from City Hall was liberated from police custody and delivered to the campaign of Ganim’s challenger, John Gomes, which posted it on the internet and brought it to the attention of news organizations and the state Elections Enforcement Commission.

The video appears to show a Ganim campaign worker who is a city employee leaving City Hall to make four deposits of absentee ballots in a ballot-collection box just outside the building in the early-morning darkness a week before the primary. On her fourth trip to the box she is joined by an unidentified man and directs him to do the deposit while she watches from a doorway.

A few weeks ago the Elections Enforcement Commission, with gross belatedness, made a criminal complaint against the Ganim campaign worker over her improprieties with absentee ballots in the primary four years ago.

State law restricts delivery of completed absentee ballots to people delivering or mailing their own ballots, their family members or caretakers, police officers, and election officials. 

Four years ago a court found there was substantial impropriety with absentee ballots in the primary but not enough to order a new one. Ganim’s margin of victory in this year’s primary was much smaller, so if legal action is taken, maybe the video and other evidence developed from it will be considered sufficient cause for a do-over. 

If not, the voters of Bridgeport still will be able to pass judgment on the scandal when they vote in the city’s general election in November, where Gomes will be on the ballot as a petitioning candidate challenging Ganim. Of course misconduct with absentee ballots may be a powerful temptation there too unless the elections commission sends dozens of investigators to the city in advance to interview everyone seeking or purporting to seek an absentee ballot.

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Bridgeport, impoverished and anarchic with a city government often incompetent and corrupt, may remain that way forever since state government doesn’t much care about it, because most people outside the city don’t care about it any more than they care about Connecticut’s other impoverished cities. People may figure that politics isn’t capable of making the cities more than poverty and patronage factories serving the majority party. 

After all, having served seven years in prison for his conviction on 16 federal charges of corruption committed during his first stint as Bridgeport’s mayor, Ganim was re-elected in 2015 — a proclamation of the city’s demoralization — and everyone in authority in state government accepted him back as if nothing had happened. No one in authority pondered the demoralization or its cause, which may have involved the longstanding failure of urban policy. Nobody in authority proposed legislation disqualifying from elective office people with felony convictions for corruption.

But someone in authority should be able to articulate the danger signified for the whole state by the absentee ballot improprieties in Bridgeport. That is, the more intermediaries between voters and the casting of their votes, the more corruption.

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Connecticut’s Constitution allows voting by absentee ballot for voters who are absent from the state or their town on Election Day, sick or physically disabled, or under religious obligation against secular activity. But next year Connecticut will hold a referendum on a proposed state constitutional amendment allowing absentee ballots to be cast just for a voter’s convenience, with no reason required.

That amendment will be a broad invitation for corruption — and completely unnecessary, since Connecticut has just authorized 14 days of in-person voting in advance of a general election, starting next year. That will be convenience without corruption. Maybe Bridgeport can’t be changed, but Connecticut can be prevented from becoming like Bridgeport.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)