Bridgeport students head to Hartford to push for school funding amid $30M deficit

‘They cannot go to the bathroom.’ CT House approves protections for warehouse workers

‘I wanted to end it all.’ Report says human trafficking victims struggle to find help in CT

Homeschooling parents clash with lawmakers over Waterbury captivity case

Connecticut State Police secure new contract with pay raises

Immigration experts: Undocumented Venezuelans who live in CT should apply for Temporary Protected Status

connecticut

News 12 Staff

CTPP914B_2024-09-14-16-53-05

I'm Mark Sudal. Welcome back to power and politics in November. When voters go to the polls, they will find a question on their ballot. Shall the constitution of the state be amended to permit the General Assembly to allow each voter to vote by absentee ballot. State rep. Matt Blumenthal joins us now to talk more about this. Welcome to you. Thanks for having me, Mark. So you wrote an op ed piece about this and you say voters should answer yes to this question. Why the short version is that we've been running a controlled experiment between Connecticut and the rest of the country and it hasn't been going well for Connecticut in 36 other states in the district of Columbia. You can, if you're eligible to vote, get an absentee ballot for whatever reason you wish and that increases access. It increases cost efficiency and ease of administration and it increases security. So I urge everyone to vote. Yes. So this ballot measure is the combination of 100 and 50 years of work. Take us a little bit through that timeline. Yeah. Mark, not for nothing. We call the land of steady habits um over the past 150 years, we've been slowly moving towards increased access for absentee balloting. And that history starts during the civil war in 1861 when union troops marched south from Connecticut to preserve the union and defeat slavery and they couldn't vote because they were not in the state. And we didn't have absentee vote in the general assembly tried to pass a law allowing them to vote absentee. A year later, the State Supreme Court said unconstitutional. So get this. We passed a temporary constitutional amendment that lasted only the duration of the war to allow Union troops to vote absentee. Then we took it back. We did that again in 1918 when again, troops were headed to Europe to fight in World War one. And the next times we actually allowed absentee balloting for people other than troops were in 1932. When most of the reasons we allow currently physical disability, absence from town sickness were allowed and then religious observance was allowed in 1919 64. In the interim, a vast amount of states have allowed absentee balloting for all. Fraud is vanishingly rare. Access is through the roof. And we saw that in the COVID-19 pandemic. When again, we had temporary access for everyone to an absentee ballot. 79.7% turnout the most in any recorded history in Connecticut. That's an amazing number when you think about it now would absentee voting improve our election process and, and you said avoid some of this voter fraud. Yeah. So right now, our restrictive absentee ballot laws are actually the source of a lot of elections in propriety because when you have a complicated and narrow ability to get a ballot, there's an incentive to engage in impropriety. Uh Meanwhile, when you have absentee balloting for all, there's not the same incentive for campaign workers to focus on a predefined, narrow, potentially vulnerable group of individuals. And there's increased deterrence because everyone can get an absentee ballot. You'll never be sure that you get away with it and you'll actually be deterred because you're almost certain not to. And it also increases cost efficiency. We have kind of a siloed election system between our registrars and our town clerks right now and they have to double the work. And so this will allow us to save money for the taxpayers and make our elections easier to administer. Now, I'm guessing you have, have you discussed this yet with the Connecticut Secretary of the State? And what does she think about it? She's very much in support and in fact, so are many of the other elections officials that I've talked to. They want to make the system more efficient, easier to minister. And in fact, the judges that judged the situation in Bridgeport the past two times where there were alleged improprieties recommended that we adopt this system of absentee voting for everyone because again, they recognized that there would be increased security and decreased incentive to engage in impropriety. So to make this crystal clear for our viewers when, when folks are voting absentee, they'll mail that in. Um So you can apply electronically if this passes. I mean, currently you can vote absentee that way too. You can apply electronically or you can submit a form requesting absentee ballot in the future. We have to redesign the application process but we anticipate having a request absentee ballot process in the future. Um If this ballot measure passes, is there any anything online that they can go to a website where they can learn more about this and, and maybe this might encourage more people or so I published an op ed that details this history and present in a little more detail. It was in the Hearst papers. I'm gonna be continuing to get out there. The Secretary of the State's website should have information as well on this ballot measure. You should be able to see the question and the explanatory language that will really make it clear what this ballot measure does. And I think if you read it, why you should support it. Well, I mean, as we know, I mean, over the years, there's been a lot of issues with the voting process here in the state of Connecticut. We had the, the voter fraud obviously in Bridgeport and there's just been many of these, I think around our state the, I mean, any anything else that we can do until absentee uh voting? Well, we've actually done a number of things this past year through legislation. We passed this session to increase the speed and vigorous of enforcement to increase tracking, to make sure that every absentee ballot dropbox is under video surveillance that's publicly available. So we took some measures to increase security on that point and also to secure of our elections officials and elections workers who are under threat around the country. Um So we've taken some measures and those measures will be in effect. But the thing that people can do to increase access to voting, security of voting and efficiency and tax savings for voting is vote for this absentee ballot. All right, Matt Blumenthal, thank you. Thank you very much. Mark Yale University has reached a major legal settlement with dozens of fertility patients. A nurse stole their anesthesia leaving the victims in excruciating pain. Attorneys for 93 women announced the settlement in New Haven this week. The dollar amount is not being disclosed. Creus Henry says she still has nightmares about the pain she endured when doctors extracted her eggs during the procedure. I felt everything. I um waste my pain. I was visibly crying in a statement, the university says Yale medicine has instituted many new measures to ensure we have the most rigorous processes, procedures and safeguards in place including additional staff, training and supervision, enhanced management systems and clinical protocols and a new physician leader for the program. Political vandalism strikes a homeowner in Watertown. That's next.

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Police in Watertown looking for the person who stole campaign signs and a pride flag from a home. Police say the resident first received a disparaging letter last week commenting on democratic political candidates the next day, a surveillance camera shows someone taking four signs and the flag from the yard. Anyone with information is asked to call Watertown police. Governor Lamont requesting a major disaster declaration following the historic flooding in August, federal assistance for infrastructure repairs is sought for Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties just days after the flooding, an emergency declaration was granted which allowed for co ordination with fema at the state Capitol. A discussion on mental health care health care providers, nonprofits and advocates joined Comptroller Sean Scanlon. The topic mental health care obstacles that Connecticut residents are facing. The summit is part of Scanlon's ongoing effort to address issues of mental health and substance abuse. One bill never solves these problems. It's the cumulative effort of what we all do both in government and without of government sort of in the nonprofit space and the provider space, all of us need to work together to solve these problems. Scanlan says there's more work to do in terms of making health care more accessible and affordable. That's all our time. I'm Mark Sudal. Thanks for watching.

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