Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Wanting to be pious, people like to say that a financial value can’t be set on human life. But of course society calculates such value all the time.

Government does it when appropriating for medical care and public safety. Insurance companies and their customers do it when writing and purchasing policies. Lawyers and courts do it when litigating damage lawsuits.

This may seem insensitive and, at times, even cruel, but life has to go on and everything can’t be liquidated to redress a single casualty.

So how much is Randy Cox’s former life worth now that he is paralyzed from the neck down as a result of the incident in June when he was in the custody of police in New Haven?

Cox was handcuffed and sitting in a police van without seatbelts when it stopped abruptly to avoid a crash, causing him to slide on a bench head-first into the van’s front wall, breaking his neck. It was captured on the van’s video system and quickly posted on the internet and seen worldwide.

Cox’s lawyers are suing for $100 million, one of them declaring: “There is no amount of money in damages that can compensate this man for the injuries he sustained.” But Cox’s other lawyer acknowledges that $20 million to $30 million might provide basic lifetime care for the paralyzed man, and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker wants the lawsuit to end with a settlement rather than a trial.

While as a matter of law the city may be solely responsible for what happens to people in the custody of its police, Cox alone is to blame for how he came to be in police custody.

He was at a block party and scaring people by brandishing a pistol, prompting a call to police. He seems to have been drunk.

Police video shows him approaching officers while holding a half-empty liquor bottle and refusing to respond when asked his name and if he is carrying anything else. Officers found the pistol tucked into his pants, concealed under his shirt. Since Cox had no permit to carry the gun, he was arrested, cuffed, and put into the van to be taken to police headquarters.

Apparently believing that Cox’s uncooperativeness arose from his intoxication, officers at headquarters treated him callously, video of which has prompted anger. But that callousness did not cause Cox’s injury, nor does racism seem to have motivated the callousness, since, while Cox is Black, so are several officers who dealt with him.

Instead the case seems to have been just more of the ordinary madness of urban underclass life, which easily can make those who have to work with it insensitive and cynical. Their cynicism is often justified by the revolving doors of criminal justice — Cox himself is a repeat offender — and the chronic failure of social work.

The good intentions of public policy have not yet alleviated the madness.

There is more madness in the outrage being instigated by Cox’s lawyers, as well as in their demand for $100 million in damages.

For no one tried to harm Cox, much less harm him because of his race. This case is not what Cox’s lawyers liken it to, the murder of George Floyd by racist police in Minneapolis. Indeed, just two years ago New Haven had a Black mayor who didn’t worry about the lack of seatbelts in police vans. Most city residents are poor and from minority groups, and city government strives to be the most politically correct in the world.

If Cox wins $100 million in damages from New Haven, the bill will come to about $770 per capita or more than $1,000 per adult. The city’s insurer likely will pay much of it but then strive to recover it from the city through higher premiums. Since the city is impoverished, state government subsidizes the city heavily and so will pay too, even as Connecticut’s economy has been lagging and continues to weaken even as the state’s unmet human needs are huge and growing.

Yes, Cox deserves enough compensation to recover what reasonably can be recovered of his life, and the demagoguery of his lawyers may be just a strategy for raising the political pressure on New Haven city government to be more generous in a settlement.

But lawyers who demagogue about justice while working on a contingency fee basis, confident that their target has plenty of insurance, are not seeking justice alone. The righteousness business can pay well.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

With a protest march on campus the other day, students at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain showed the world that they haven’t learned what even kids in elementary school might be expected to know.

The students demanded that the university administration investigate a fellow student’s complaint of sexual assault that had not yet been made formally to any police agency or to the university itself.

Instead, the accusation had been made by the complainant only on a social media internet site, TikTok, which may be best known for posting videos encouraging young people to do stupid, dangerous, damaging, and even criminal things to get attention, the infamous “TikTok challenges.”

As it turned out, the university had heard of the accusation on TikTok prior to the student protest march and already had hired some outsiders to investigate, the campus police and New Britain police apparently being considered incompetent.

Having handled the matter in such a strange way, the university was in no position to remind the student protesters that if you want the authorities to act against crime, the first thing to do is to report it to them. Central’s campus is dotted with emergency telephone stations, and most young people these days would leave home in the morning without their shoes before they left without their mobile phones. But of course holding a protest march before there is anything to protest provides a rush of self-righteousness.

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ANOTHER ABORTION PHONY: U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat seeking election to a third term, isn’t the only candidate for senator who is dissembling on the abortion issue.

Blumenthal says his abortion legislation in Congress, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would simply put into federal law the policy articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. But the Roe decision held that states properly could prohibit or regulate abortion after the viability of the unborn child, while Blumenthal’s legislation would prohibit states from restriction abortion at [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] stage of pregnancy.

Blumenthal’s Republican challenger, Leora Levy, recently deflected a request from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers to say what she thinks about South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s legislation to outlaw abortions nationally after 15 weeks of gestation.

Levy used to support abortion rights. But during the primary campaign for the Republican Senate nomination, Levy declared herself to be completely anti-abortion and explained in detail why she had changed her mind. Now she seems to be changing her mind again.

“I am personally pro-life and I support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother,” she said in response to the inquiry from the Hearst papers about Graham’s legislation. “When I am elected to the Senate, I will be accountable to the people of Connecticut for my votes and positions.”

That is, fervent opposition to abortion is helpful in winning a Republican primary but not in winning an election. Levy is so principled on abortion that she now wishes the issue would just go away. Yes, Levy will be accountable for her positions after the election — when it’s too late for voters to do anything about being misled.

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ERASING ACCOUNTABILITY: Erasing criminal records, thereby diminishing accountability from criminals, and increasing accountability from police officers have become great causes on the political left in Connecticut. The resolution of a recent case in Hartford Superior Court showed that the first cause can defeat the latter.

Over the objections of a prosecutor, Superior Court Judge Stephanie A. Damiani admitted a former Glastonbury police lieutenant, Kevin Troy, to two diversionary programs as he faced charges of drunken driving and interfering with police. Troy had gotten drunk, caused a rollover crash in Enfield, and then lied to police about it, telling them that someone else had been driving. Troy’s completion of the programs will erase the records of his offenses.

Troy retired from the Glastonbury department after his arrest but is only 49 and might seek to return to police work elsewhere. With his criminal record erased, a big impediment to that will be out of the way.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Holy cow! A few people in Connecticut are starting to notice the long failure of social policy and, more remarkably, finding the courage to discuss it.

The revelation came in a recent report by investigative reporter Bill Cummings of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers quoting some worthies in the Bridgeport area. Cummings wrote that “the number of homicides in Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven has remained consistent over the last decade, raising questions about whether policing and social programs — and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them — are making a difference.”

The report noted that for many years murder victims in the cities have been mostly young Black males from their teens to their 30s.

Bridgeport state Sen. Margaret Moore, a Democrat, said she was shocked by the Hearst report. “It seems like we have not learned anything,” Moore said, “and our values have not improved.” By that she meant that there has been no general [ITALICS] recognition [END ITALICS] and [ITALICS] acknowledgment [END ITALICS] of failure. “What we have done has not worked,” she said.

The president of the Bridgeport chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, D. Stanley Lord, expressed skepticism of “program after program after program,” doubting that young people are really being reached.

Indeed, if “Black lives matter” was more than a slogan for using social disintegration to gain political patronage, the self-slaughter of young Black men and boys in Connecticut would have let up a bit by now.

Unfortunately the Hearst report found no one proposing alternatives to “program after program after program.” There was the usual prattle about the need for more “job training,” but most city children never master ordinary elementary and high school subjects, prerequisites for any job beyond the menial minimum-wage work that often causes those stuck in it to try the drug trade instead.

Connecticut congratulates itself for a rising high school graduation rate even as chronic absenteeism is overwhelming in city schools, students advance entirely by social promotion, and even illiterates are given diplomas lest they lose self-esteem.

One observer quoted in the Hearst report, Jessica Pizzano of Survivors of Homicide, may have gotten closest to the underlying problem. “Kids don’t go to the street because they are bad,” Pizzano said. “They are looking for love and affection. Gangs are families — not great families, but for some that is the only structure they know, anyone showing you kindness.”

No one quoted in the Hearst report spoke the words “parents” or “fathers” and the report did not include them anywhere. But the report’s acknowledgment of the failure of Connecticut’s social policy may embolden others to make similar acknowledgments, and more acknowledgments might assist the realization that programs and policies that don’t achieve their nominal objectives are continued anyway because perpetuating them and the employment they provide now substitutes as their highest objective.

* * *

Most news reporting last week about the appointment of the new president of the University of Connecticut, Radenka Maric, by the university’s Board of Trustees was not interested in the terms of her new contract, despite the financial excesses granted to two of her three most recent predecessors.

Maric, who joined the university as a professor in 2010 and served as vice president for five years before being named interim president in February, is expected to be given a five-year contract. It has not been finalized but is expected to provide a salary of $610,000 with the incentive for “performance bonuses” and the usual presidential perks of housing and a car allowance — not too shabby.

But will Maric’s contract also contain a “golden parachute” provision like the one invoked by UConn President Thomas C. Katsouleas when he resigned in July 2021 after only two years on the job amid conflict with the trustees? Katsouleas was guaranteed a tenured professorship with UConn’s highest professor pay, then $330,000, and so may be around forever. Such guarantees are powerful disincentives to performance.

Last week the “golden parachute” issue had not yet been settled. So Connecticut will have to wait a while to see if UConn’s trustees have learned anything.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Maybe that assistant principal in Greenwich who was recently caught admitting that he hires only young liberals as teachers, the better to propagandize students into voting Democratic, wasn’t such an outlier. The more recent incident at Southington High School, where an English teacher was caught inflicting political propaganda on students, suggests that Connecticut may actually be the center of the campaign to dump education for indoctrination.

The teacher distributed to students a packet titled “Vocabulary for Conversations about Race, Gender, Equality and Inclusivity.” It contained a glossary of terms involving transgenderism and racism, topics with which public schools are increasingly obsessed to the detriment of education. The glossary had no relation to material being taught in the teacher’s English classes but supposedly was meant to help if discussion ever turned to the glossary’s subjects.

Another section of the packet revealed that its objective indeed was to turn discussion to those subjects for indoctrination purposes. It said: “You can know in your heart that you don’t hate anyone but still contribute to their oppression. No individual is personally responsible for what white people have done or the historical decisions of the American government, but you are responsible for whether you are upholding the systems that elevate white people over people of color.”

That is: You kids may be oppressors too without even knowing it — yet.

While Southington School Superintendent Steven Madancy told a Board of Education meeting that he supports his teachers, in an open letter to the town he admitted that the English teacher had gone too far. “As a result of our comprehensive review,” the superintendent wrote, “the teacher now realizes that the sources utilized to develop these supplemental materials may not have been neutral in nature and recognizes the bias and controversial statements that some took issue with.”

So the teacher had been counseled not to do stuff like this again, which ordinarily might be enough. But instead things got worse.

The school board’s chairwoman, Colleen Clark, chided those who complained about the propagandizing. “I resent that a personnel matter regarding one of our teachers and our schools has been turned into a political platform by those who have noneducational agendas,” Clark said.

But those who complained about the English teacher’s manifesto weren’t the ones injecting politics into the schools; that was done by the teacher. (Since this is “public” education, despite the misconduct involved, the teacher has not been identified.)

Besides, since nearly everything in public education is to some degree a personnel matter, democracy inevitably makes public education political.

The situation got still worse with an open letter to the Southington board from 60 members of the faculty of Southern Connecticut State University, who called the board’s review of the teacher’s conduct “a politically motivated attack on free speech.”

But the teacher’s freedom of speech wasn’t attacked. The teacher was faulted for commandeering the school curriculum, which is for the school administration, the school board, and, ultimately, the public to determine.

That is exactly what the Southern professors meant to deny. They continued: “We strongly support parental rights in the home. But few parents are experts in education. … Parents … should not determine which texts are read and what language is introduced in order to make sense of those texts.

“To permit parents — or students — to object to what they perceive as ‘divisive’ texts is to descend down the slippery slope of allowing a relatively small but vocal group of parents and students to circumscribe and dictate the nature of public education.”

That is, the public has no right to review “public” education, which should be left to those who suppose themselves to be experts.

Instantly the Southern professors had turned from purported defenders of free speech to resentful opponents. For the critics of the teacher’s manifesto didn’t “circumscribe and dictate the nature of public education.” They exercised free speech in pursuit of their equally constitutional right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Once again those who dominate “public” education in Connecticut have revealed that they don’t think it should be public at all.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Has Connecticut state government been turned around, going from huge deficits to huge surpluses, because of Governor Lamont’s great leadership, as the commercials for his re-election campaign claim?

The state has had worse governors but its much improved financial position has little to do with anything state government has done.

The improvement is almost entirely a matter of the billions of dollars in emergency money recently given to Connecticut by the federal government. The Lamont administration did not achieve its budget surplus with changes in policy or practice that produced big savings.

To the contrary, nearly every group with a selfish interest in government appropriations is happy and supporting re-election of the governor, the Democratic nominee. Nearly everything involving great expense in government goes on just as before, and the governor can merrily traverse the state distributing expensive goodies even as the price of food, fuel, and most other necessities has been driven up by inflation caused by the creation of the federal money financing the goodies.

Of course most people notice and resent the inflation. But few understand where it comes from. Most think it’s like the weather, beyond control. Connecticut Republicans haven’t tried to explain it, though it is explained by an old Republican principle:

Nothing in government is free except the posturing.

At least Connecticut’s Republicans have a small remedy for inflation: to use much of state government’s surplus to reduce gasoline, property, and sales taxes.

With a belated platform, their “Contract with Connecticut,” Republican candidates for the General Assembly have joined their candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, with a wonderfully mischievous idea for property tax relief.

This is the objective Democrats always are claiming to pursue but never achieve, since, by design, municipal spending rises to absorb whatever extra aid municipalities receive from state government in the name of property tax relief, the money being used not to reduce taxes but to increase compensation for government employees — the Democratic Party’s army.

That is, the Republicans would let people deduct from their taxable income as much as $10,000 of their municipal property taxes. In effect for many people this would be a big cut in the state income tax, which Stefanowski implausibly proposed to eliminate during his first campaign for governor four years ago. Under the Republican plan, the more municipalities raised property taxes, the more income tax relief property taxpayers would get — real tax relief at last even as state government’s spending might be restrained by falling revenue from the income tax.

In reducing state government’s revenue, the Republican platform is only the most indirect program for economizing.

It is not a plan to audit the expensive policies that long have failed to achieve their nominal objectives.

But then any serious review of education, welfare, urban, and economic policies would be terrifying, what with education’s costs, wokeness, and pomposity rising as learning collapses, the dependence and alienation of the underclass worsening, the cities sinking deeper in poverty and crime, and Connecticut lagging most states in economic and population growth.

Comprehensive policy auditing might be too much for most voters to take. Faced with such audits, most voters might retreat to watch more of the governor’s campaign commercials assuring them that everything in Connecticut is suddenly wonderful, and most might strive to believe it even if, through an open window, they could hear more gunshots, sirens, and sawing of catalytic converters.

When the emergency federal money runs out Connecticut will face the challenges and choices it now desperately postpones. This may happen sooner if the state surplus is spent through tax cuts as the Republicans propose and if the Federal Reserve, by raising interest rates, induces a severe recession in the name of curbing the inflation that has been caused not by low rates but by the creation and spending of vast sums unbacked by taxes or production.

Reality will be a terrible hangover — but for the time being that’s OK, since it won’t arrive until after the election.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Secrecy triumphed again this month in “public” education in Connecticut.

First the Connecticut State Colleges and University System refused to make available to the Journal Inquirer the personnel files of three officials who were sued in an employment discrimination case whose settlement recently cost the state $775,000. The newspaper was seeking to discover why the plaintiff, Manchester Community College President Nicole Esposito, was fired, what the defendants did to prompt her lawsuit, and why the college system decided to reinstate her with such expensive damages.

The system has refused to provide an explanation, though nothing in the law prevents the system from coming clean. Now the public will have to wait a year or more for the state Freedom of Information Commission to decide on ordering disclosure of the relevant documents.

Worse, several state legislators, questioned by the newspaper about the expensive case, just shrugged it off.

The leader of the Democratic majority in the state House of Representatives, Jason Rojas of East Hartford, said he doesn’t like making public the personnel files of government employees, though with very limited exemptions this has been the law in Connecticut since before he was born.

Government employees, Rojas said, “should expect some level of privacy as it relates to their work and their careers.” He added that giving the public access to government employee personnel files “could have a very chilling effect on our ability to attract and retain talent.”

But disclosure was the law when those college officials were hired and the problem now is only the ability of government agencies and employees to delay disclosure until action by the FOI Commission, which is backlogged.

As for any “chilling effect” on attracting talent to state government, the three executives sued in the discrimination case — Robert Steinmetz, Andrew Kripp, and Alice Pritchard — are paid annual salaries of $256,000, $240,000, and $228,000, respectively. Would accountability for the discrimination case really chill them out of their state jobs and luxurious pensions?

The General Assembly could hold a public hearing and call witnesses to fix responsibility in this scandal but prefers to assist the cover-up.

Secrecy also triumphed this month in the Hartford “public” school system, which, after weeks of stalling, released documents showing that Kathleen Cataford, the school nurse suspended in March for supposedly identifying on social media a student undergoing sex-change therapy, was fired in July.

In fact the nurse wrote only that an 11-year-old girl in the school system was undergoing such therapy and that school policy is to conceal the gender dysphoria of students from their parents unless students want it told.

Hartford’s schools have more than one 11-year-old girl, so what really bothered the school administration was the nurse’s publicizing its policy of keeping parents ignorant of their children’s health problems, an increasingly controversial policy being implemented by schools throughout Connecticut and the country.

These circumstances suggest that the nurse’s firing, while politically correct, was improper and that she might win reinstatement by appealing to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration. After all, the board long has made it almost impossible to fire government employees for any reason.

So [ITALICS] has [END ITALICS] the nurse appealed her firing? Hartford’s school system won’t say, though the state Labor Department, which supervises the mediation board, says no appeal has yet been received. (The nurse has made herself incommunicado since her suspension.)

Is the school system negotiating a financial settlement with the nurse? Again the school system won’t say. Maybe such a settlement won’t even be disclosed. In any case it may be fair to suspect that, as with the case of the community college president, any financial settlement will impair accountability to the public.

If public education isn’t going to be public, there is no need for it. Government can just give vouchers to parents and let them buy education for their children in the market that will quickly develop. In addition to being more accountable to parents, education by voucher probably would be much better and far less expensive.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

How righteous Connecticut Attorney General William Tong sounds as he rails against M&T Bank for its defective integration of accounts from People’s United Bank, which M&T acquired in April. Tong also fears that M&T isn’t preserving as many jobs from People’s United as planned.

These problems shouldn’t be so surprising. Both banks are big enterprises, so their combination should have raised antitrust law concerns in the attorney general’s office as well as with federal and state banking regulators. Indeed, quite apart from those regulators the attorney general well might have prevented the merger on his own just by challenging it with an antitrust lawsuit in state court.

But antitrust law enforcement and banking regulation have not been taken seriously lately by either the federal government or state government. Big banks almost always get what they want.

Even now M&T’s dealing with the attorney general over his belated concerns won’t be hurt by the bank’s recent hiring, as a senior vice president, of Max Reiss, Governor Lamont’s former communications director. Banks know how to get what they want.

* * *

Kevin Ollie didn’t coach the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team long enough to get rich on the job, but now he has gotten rich from the university’s incompetent firing of him four years ago.

On top of the $11.2 million UConn paid Ollie this year to make good on what remained of his contract when he was fired, the university now will pay him another $3.9 million for lawyer fees and damage to his reputation, making more than $15 million altogether. Ollie’s lawyer seems to be more competent than all the lawyers who advised and represented the university on the issue.

The university’s incompetence here was in at least three parts: giving Ollie a multiple-year contract; allowing him to join the professors union, which increased his protection against dismissal; and then treating Ollie more severely for violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules than the university treated his predecessor, Jim Calhoun.

But UConn long has cared far more about appearances than about costs, and why should UConn care about its costs when Governor Lamont and the General Assembly don’t? At UConn $15 million is chump change, and it will remain chump change until the governor and legislature hold the university accountable for anything.

There has been and will be no investigation of the Ollie disaster, and UConn may be lucky that the costly disaster of its football team has just flared up again to distract from the costly disaster with Ollie.

* * *

THE PARTY’S OVER: Four years ago the Republican candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, who is also this year’s Republican candidate, got more than 25,000 votes on the ballot line of Connecticut’s Independent Party. Stefanowski won’t be getting them this year, since, after some cheating and double voting at its convention, the party decided by one vote to nominate its own candidate rather than cross-endorse Stefanowski again.

This may not be as big a blow to Stefanowski as it is being construed as he challenges Governor Lamont, the Democratic nominee. For Stefanowski almost certainly brought more votes to the Independent Party line four years ago than the Independent Party line brought to Stefanowski. His votes on the Independent line came from people who wanted regime change but didn’t want to risk getting tainted as partisans.

Indeed, the platform articulated by the Independent Party’s candidate for governor, Rob Hotaling, sounds Republican, as it stresses reducing Connecticut’s cost of living and taxes. So why not cross-endorse the Republican candidate again? After all, the Independent nominee isn’t going to win but will split the vote aligned with the party’s nominal objectives. Under the system of ranked-choice voting lately being discussed in Connecticut, most of the Independent candidate’s second-choice votes would go to the Republican nominee.

This makes the Independent Party’s separate candidacy for governor a vanity project. Connecticut’s other two minor parties, the Working Families Party and the Griebel-Frank Party, are serious, cross-endorsing the governor.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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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.

* * *

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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By Chris Powell

Ranked-choice voting has an endorsement from Governor Lamont, a Democrat, and an open mind from his Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, so it is doubly worth discussing during this election campaign.

The ranked-choice idea applies to election contests with three or more candidates, contests that present the risk that the candidate with the most votes will have only a plurality rather than a majority of the vote and thus enter office with less legitimacy unless there is a runoff election. Without a runoff election, the plurality winner could be repellent to most voters, installing extremism when most votes were cast for moderates.

Ranked-choice voting provides an [ITALICS] instant [END ITALICS] runoff election. Voters are invited to indicate not just their first-choice candidate but also second and even third or fourth choices. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the least votes is disqualified and his votes are reassigned to candidates as his voters directed. This process is repeated and the votes of the eliminated candidates reassigned until a majority is constructed.

This avoids the expense of reaching a majority by holding multiple elections.

The main objection to ranked-choice voting is that it might confuse people. But ranked choice doesn’t require people to vote for more than one candidate for any office; it just enables them to do so. Anyone confused by the new system could keep voting the old way, making just one choice for each office on the ballot.

Theoretically, a ranked-choice system gives voters more power, allowing them to protect themselves against what they consider the most objectionable potential results of an election. Such a system also might encourage people to vote for lesser-known but possibly better-qualified candidates without risk of wasting their vote, since their second-choice candidate will get their vote if their first choice fails.

The ranked-choice system has not been tried enough in the United States to be sure about it. But over time it might strengthen minor parties and increase voter choice without causing much damage to the two-party system, since most ranked-choice votes might be transferred to major-party candidates in an election’s second tabulation.

Ranked-choice voting also might diminish the influence of “spoiler” candidates, candidates seeking to take votes from other candidates just for spite, since many votes for spoilers would be reassigned anyway.

In any case, in recent decades Connecticut has had some important elections with three or more candidates in which the plurality winner well may not have reflected the desire of the majority.

Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the Republican nominee, was elected U.S. senator in 1970 with only 42% of the vote in a three-way contest, the other two candidates being Democrats who split their party. Ranked-choice voting might have elected one of the Democrats.

Weicker was elected governor as an independent in 1990 with only 40% of the vote in a three-way contest, defeating a Republican and a Democrat who ran third, though Weicker probably would have won a runoff with most Democratic votes transferred to him.

The state’s 1994 election for governor practically screamed for ranked-choice voting, since it had four candidates, with the winner, John G. Rowland, the Republican, receiving only 36% of the vote, a liberal minor-party candidate getting 19%, and a conservative independent candidate getting 11%. Ranked-choice voting might have elected the Democrat, Bill Curry, who received 33%.

The Republican primary for governor four years ago also made a strong case for ranked-choice voting, since the winner, Bob Stefanowski, got only 29% of the vote in a five-way contest. Ranked-choice voting might have given the nomination to the convention-endorsed candidate, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, or ranked-choice voting might have unified the party faster behind Stefanowski.

Governor Lamont observes that apart from building majority support for the winner, ranked-choice voting might improve the tenor of politics, since candidates might refrain from getting nasty about lesser competitors and risking second-choice votes.

Given its history of important elections settled by less than a majority vote, Connecticut has strong reason to consider ranked-choice voting.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

If distributing more money was the solution to the state’s serious social problems, Connecticut would have solved them long ago. Instead state government now has another commission, the Commission on Community Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention, which met for the first time last month and is to advise the state Public Health Department about awarding another $2.9 million in grants to “community-based violence-intervention organizations.”

Despite last month’s announcement from Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign that Connecticut is headed toward “four more years of gun safety,” the daily shootings continue, especially in the cities. Except for the political patronage to be conferred by those grants, no one really needs “community-based violence-intervention organizations” to figure out why.

For starters, most children in the cities have little if any parenting. More than 80% are living without a father in their home, many having no contact with their fathers at all. Many of their mothers are badly stressed by single parenting and trying to make a living, even with welfare benefits. Some have drug problems. Some are so addled that their children are being raised by a grandparent.

Their parents having failed them, many children then fail in school, if they even reach school. The chronic absenteeism rate in Hartford’s school system is 44%, in New Haven’s 58%. It is high in some suburbs too. While most children in Connecticut graduate from high school without ever mastering basic math and English, the failure to meet grade-level proficiency in city schools is catastrophic at all levels.

As a result many young people — most young people in the cities — enter adult life without the education and job skills necessary to get out of poverty, demoralized, resentful, angry, often unhealthy mentally as well as physically, lacking respect for society and indifferent to decent behavior. These circumstances prove disastrous when they collide with the natural male aggressiveness that has never been tamed by parenting.

Many quickly get in trouble with the law, and repeatedly, and so become still more alienated, not ever understanding what hit them and why, since, after all, the underclass lifestyle has been normalized. Guns are everywhere — and always will be, no matter what laws are enacted — and so will always present what seem like opportunities for advancement or settling scores.

“Community-based violence-intervention organizations” and their advocates think that, most of all, these troubled young men need a good talking to, and indeed such counseling can help temporarily in critical situations. But other critical situations soon develop unless someone can escape the underclass culture.

As with so much else wrong with society, government chooses to address only the symptoms, not the causes. Especially with social problems, when government encounters the equivalent of broken pipes flooding a road or basement, it doesn’t try to repair the pipes but instead calls for more buckets for bailing. The bucket manufacturers make a fortune but the problem is never solved, since mere remediation quickly becomes too profitable financially and politically.

Government refuses to learn from this though it’s an old story. Many years ago an episode of the television drama “Law and Order” showed police detectives entering a dark and dingy city apartment where an abandoned baby was crying. A veteran detective who had seen it all remarked: “How about if I just take him to Rikers now?”

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PARENTAL BILL OF RIGHTS: While the formal text of the “parental bill of rights” proposed by the Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, Bob Stefanowski and Laura Devlin, which was cited in this column last week, does not say so explicitly, Stefanowski elaborates that its provision on school choice means to make church schools eligible for state-financed student vouchers.

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SOCIAL SECURITY TAX: Supporting U.S. Rep. John B. Larson’s legislation to strengthen the Social Security system, this column last week misstated the annual personal income level at which the Social Security tax is lifted. It is $147,000, not $400,000. To improve the system’s financing, Larson’s legislation would impose a special 2% tax on incomes above $400,000.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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