Days after President Donald Trump staged a primetime address to make unfounded claims about American elections, Connecticut’s top officials held a press conference of their own to tout the state’s commitment to election security.
“Last week, the president used a primetime address to tell Americans that voting systems can be manipulated and elections can be stolen,” said Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas, Connecticut’s top elections official. “Here in Connecticut, that is just plain wrong.”
“Fear is not evidence. Repetition does not make something true,” Thomas said. “We do not run Connecticut elections on vibes. We run them with trained people, paper ballots, and results that can be checked and verified.”
Thomas was joined at the Monday press conference at Connecticut’s Old State House in Hartford by Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, Attorney General William Tong, Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection Commissioner Ronnell Higgins, and Connecticut General Assembly Government Administration and Elections Committee co-chair Rep. Matt Blumenthal (D-Stamford).
In addition to comments seeking to reassure Connecticut residents that the state’s election systems are free, fair, and accurate, the officials also took swipes at the president’s history of spreading unfounded election claims, like his oft-repeated lie that he won the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
“There's only one man who tried to strongarm Georgia elections officials into finding him more than 10,000 votes,” said Blumenthal. “Only one man who tried to throw out the votes of millions of Americans by submitting false slates of electors to the Electoral College, and only one man who incited a mob to attack the Capitol of the United States to prevent the certification of a president who was lawfully and legitimately elected, and that man is Donald J. Trump.”
Lamont said he was “shocked” by Trump’s primetime address.
“Why am I getting lectures from a guy who calls up the secretary of state in Georgia and essentially says, ‘Steal me just enough votes so I can take this election?’” Lamont said. “Now this guy is saying– questioning the integrity of our elections?”
Tong celebrated wins against the Trump administration in court, including the recent dismissal of the Department of Justice’s demand for the state’s voter rolls.
“The president, again and again, as [Thomas] said, claims that there is large-scale illegal misconduct that compromises elections in Connecticut and across the country,” Tong said. “That is just not true. There is no evidence that that is true in Connecticut, or, frankly, across the country.”
“We are going to fight with everything we have, everything we've got, to protect elections,” Tong said.
