The views stated here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors of this newspaper.
(August 20, 2020) — In the past two days I have been made aware of two incidents which support the concerns being raised locally and nationally about the opportunity for fraud associated with widespread mail in voting. In both cases the persons reporting these incidents to me are people I have known for 20 years or more and both are willing to personally tell their stories to officials who are in a position to investigate.
In one case, a voter in an area town received an absentee ballot application form sent out by the CT Secretary of State for the recent Primary on August 11. She completed the form and sent it to the Town Clerk in her town and shortly received a ballot from the town which she proceeded to complete and return to the Town Clerk. Shortly after that she received a second ballot for the same Primary, this time from the Secretary of State. She did not use it to vote twice but this certainly opens the possibility of fraud.
In the second case a Haddam resident happened to be at a window in a shoreline post office when a woman approached the town’s Post Master at a second nearby window and she overheard this woman’s proposal. She explained that she was avidly anti-Trump and wanted to offer the local post office the assistance of a number of volunteers on Election Day to help with making sure that voting documents would make it through the process if the post office were to be overwhelmed. The Post Master expressed his own anti-Trump sentiments and offered to check into whether such assistance could be accepted.
What is wrong with this exchange at the post office? First, the post office official should not be expressing his political views with a patron and secondly that he would even entertain the opportunity to accept such help from non-postal employees is unacceptable.
Executive orders from the Governor and pronouncements from the Secretary of State about changes in voting methods are not the way to determine how Connecticut should vote. This is the responsibility of the Connecticut Legislature who were in session when Covid-19 came on the scene and there has been plenty of opportunity for the legislature to call a special session to deal with this important issue. Legislators have abdicated their responsibility. I say this as a former State Senator from this area.
States should not be making drastic changes in voting procedures, universal mail in voting, in a major national election. These changes should be tried out in local elections, possibly in a small section of the state, to iron out any issues that might come up. Then once we have a process we can trust we expand it further. Throwing the State of Connecticut or any other state into election chaos in a national election makes no sense whatsoever.
Ed Munster
Haddam, CT
Note: Ed Munster is President of the Haddam Civic League, the parent company of HK-Now.com.
