An unofficial recount of Bridgeport’s votes, which left the governor’s race in limbo for days after the polls closed, will begin Monday.
The Connecticut Post along with the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition will begin tallying the 22,185 votes in the governor’s race in a recount that’s expected to last through the week.
According to the numbers certified last Wednesday Governor-elect Dan Malloy won 17,976 votes, Republican Tom Foley received 4,099 votes and Independent Tom Marsh received 113 votes.
The vote counting will be led by the League of Women Voters of Connecticut, Common Cause, CT Citizen Action Group and CTVotersCount, the groups that comprise the coalition.
“Our process is a blend of Connecticut’s post-election audits and the rigorous hand counting employed in other states for their recounts,“ Luther Weeks of CTVotersCount said. “We will count machine-scanned ballots in a manner similar to Connecticut’s post-election audit law, judging the counting based on what the machine should have counted and we will report on the ballot chain of custody. For all photocopied ballots, we will count all votes according to voter’s intent as they should have been counted during the original hand counts.”
Weeks will be one of what are expected to be between 30 and 40 volunteers who will look at each of the ballots and rescan the ones it can, while hand counting the photocopied ballots that became necessary when the city ran out of official ballots on Election Day. The ballot shortage and a court order which kept the courts open until 10 p.m. on Nov. 2 contributed to delay in naming Malloy the state’s 88th governor.
“Our process is transparent but not adversarial – the City of Bridgeport is cooperating fully, providing election night materials and logistical support for this citizen recount,” Cheryl Dunson of the League of Women Voters said. “Voters have the right to vote with confidence that their vote was accurately counted. This process will help respond to concerns raised by the shortage of ballots on election night.”
The Connecticut Post and the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition volunteered to do the recount after the city declined to voluntarily participate in a post-election audit at the request of Secretary of the
State Susan Bysiewicz.
The recount will begin at 1 p.m. today in the lower level of the Bridgeport City Hall Annex. It will run 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. throughout the rest of the week.
In a press release, Weeks said Bridgeport officials have agreed to the process and will ensure the necessary security of the election materials during the recount.