Bridgeport City Officials Refuse To Do Voluntary Recount

On Monday, Susan Bysiewicz and the League of Women Voters randomly selected seventy-four precincts statewide for audits. This is a mandate that's carried out after elections. Ironically, no precincts in Bridgeport were chosen in the random selection. On Election Day, the city scrambled to photocopy ballots after the Registrars failed to order enough.

 

But in a press release this week, the Secretary of the State's office said Bridgeport had agreed to do a voluntary audit of twelve city precincts with ballot shortages.  In a phone interview, Bysiewicz says both Bridgeport Registrars had indicated to her Deputy, Leslie Mara that a review of these polling places made sense.

 

"On November 9 my deputy spoke to Sandy Ayala the Bridgeport Democratic Registrar and then she spoke to Joe Borges. And they thought it was a good idea given the cloud that had come over Bridgeport on election night and that transparency was important for the process."

 

But right before a city Elections Panel met Tuesday night for a public hearing about the widespread voting problems, city attorneys sent out a statement saying the Registrars never agreed to the audits. They say the Secretary of the State has no authority to direct the city to review the election results.

 

Arthur Laske is Bridgeport's deputy city attorney.

 

"The manpower and demands on the office of conducting a recount which is really an academic exercise is probably more than we can address. And most importantly we've already counted these ballots, they were counted in public, they were counted effectively with supervision and input from both parties who had watchers there. And we think the count is an effective indication of what the will of the people were in Bridgeport."

 

Bysiewicz says cost can be an issue when doing these audits because the state does not pick up the tab. Laske did not know how much it would cost the city to do the recount but he stressed the time it took to count the paper ballots after the election took "considerable time and effort by poll workers."