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Hartford Voter Registrars Under Fire

Jeff Cohen
/
WNPR
The Hartford Registrars of Voters office in City Hall.

Following a disastrous day in which voters across the city of Hartford were turned away from the early morning polls, there's a lot of talk about how to avoid this kind of mess in the future. 

Olga Vazquez, the city's Democratic registrar, is part of the office that failed to get voter lists to the polls on time Tuesday. She said it's harder to run a city election and count the votes than people think. "They want you to report at 12 midnight, but it's impossible," she said. "Everyone put into practice laws, but they [don't] have the slightest idea how to run an election, what it takes to run an election."

Credit Jeff Cohen / WNPR
/
WNPR

That was 12 hours after the deadline had passed. The mayor and the city council said Wednesday that they want to launch an investigation into registrar's office. They've also said they want to restructure the office entirely.

On WNPR'sWhere We Live, Secretary of State Denise Merrill said something has to be done, and asked state officials to investigate. She called what happened in Hartford a combination of gross malfeasance and simple incompetence.

"Our real problem here is that we're just far too decentralized," Merrill said. "You cannot have properly trained, professionalized people out there who are not overseen virtually by anybody -- including, by the way, the mayors and first selectmen, because they have no power over any of these people, either. They're elected by the people. Now, do we want to look at that? Probably."

Matt Ritter, a state representative from Hartford, told WNPR's Colin McEnroe Show that he has neighbors and friends who were denied their right to vote.

"That office needs to be professionalized, and maybe that's the case beyond Hartford, frankly," he said. "It's just unacceptable in 2014 that people were denied the right to vote in this country. It's beyond embarrassing."

In 2013, city voters approved a provision to make changes to the registrars office. Ritter said it was hard to enact those changes. Now, though, with even the president weighing in on Hartford's problem, the political will may be there.

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Jeff Cohen started in newspapers in 2001 and joined Connecticut Public in 2010, where he worked as a reporter and fill-in host. In 2017, he was named news director. Then, in 2022, he became a senior enterprise reporter.

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