One of the local blogs that I really enjoy reading is Small Town Mommy. Her post this morning is about how we now have two governors, or at least two candidates, both of whom claim to have won. She writes:

It would seem to me that there are a finite number of votes for each guy. Why can’t someone figure it out? And how does everyone have such different numbers? Who knows.

Well, we will figure it out, and until it is figured out, there will be lots of political posturing and probably even law suits. However, after raising three girls, I’ve learned to be patient. I remember when they were young listening to them count to twenty. They would always end up missing a number, I think it was fifteen, and then they’d hop back to thirteen. Something like that. It seemed pretty confusing.

Here in Connecticut, there were over a million votes cast in the Gubernatorial race. That’s a lot of times to get tripped up counting past fifteen. To make it even more worse, all the time that you’re counting you have people arguing over whether or not this ballot or that ballot should count.

There are several issues involved here. First, Dan Malloy’s name was listed twice on the ballot. Voters could vote for him as the Democratic candidate or as the Working Family Party candidate. It is called fusion voting and provides a good way to vote for a candidate without necessarily voting for the party. We need better education about fusion voting in Connecticut. After the election as I described the situation, I’ve heard people say that they didn’t know that and if they did, they would have voted for Malloy on the Working Family Party line instead of the Democratic line.

So, not only is there counting to be done, but there is some addition as well. To make it even more complicated, what happens if a person votes for Malloy on both the Democratic line and the Working Family Party line? Well, these need to be added into the total votes for the candidate but not added into the total votes for the party line. So, in Woodbridge, Dan Malloy received 2194 votes. 2153 were as the Democratic candidate and the rest were either Working Family Party or both Working Family Party and Democratic Party.

Now, to make this all the more complicated, I was at the election place as the numbers were read off. Like about twenty other people there, I quickly copied down the numbers, added them up, and posted them on online. The preliminary numbers that I came up with were a few votes less for both Malloy and Foley. Did I mishear some numbers? Was it because there are still random ballots, like those coming in from overseas that needed to be counted? It’s hard to tell, but I sat next to the woman from the Associated Press who was copying down numbers the same way, and behind me was the woman from Bethwood Patch also copying down numbers the same way. It is worth noting that the AP numbers now reflect the official Woodbridge numbers.

Now, let’s take a look at New Haven. Instead of having one polling place like we do in Woodbridge, New Haven has thirty five. The Associated Press tally sheet claims that with all thirty five precincts reporting, Malloy had 7,441 votes and Foley had 1,579 votes. That just lacks credibility.

The early articles where it said that Malloy won by 3,100 votes claimed that the vote for in New Haven was 19,148 for Malloy and 3,500 for Foley. However, the report from the City of New Haven shows a final tally of 22,298 for Malloy and 3,685 for Foley. This would expand Malloy’s lead to 6,065 votes.

Now, we get to the issue of Bridgeport. All the reports say that Bridgeport has 71,000 registered voters and only made ballots for 21,000. They go on to say that every municipality should make enough ballots for all the voters and have some left over in case ballots get spoiled.

There are two problems with this. Ballots cost between fifty cents and a dollar. If you buy them in bulk, like most places do, you can get them at a discount. Woodbridge has 6,434 registered voters. Historically, we have high turnout for our elections. Yet even with that, the town decided to only print 5,000 ballots. With 4,225 votes cast there were over seven hundred leftover ballots. To me, this sounds like a good margin of error. The ballots cost the town $1,500. There is no money coming from the state or federal governments to pay for the cost of printing the ballots.

So, let’s look at the cash strapped city of Bridgeport. Reports are that about 25,000 people voted in Bridgeport. If Bridgeport had printed 71,000 ballots, there would have been around 46,000 unused ballots. That many unused ballots creates additional opportunities for fraud. In addition, it would probably have cost the city around $15,000 more in printing costs. As much as some of my Republican friends are screaming right now, I can also hear them screaming Unfunded Mandate if the legislature passes a bill requiring municipalities to print 100% of the ballots.

No, printing a ballot for each possible voter just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Woodbridge calculates the number of ballots that it will need based on similar elections. So, 2006 is the most recent election that is similar to 2010. There was a Senate Race, a Governor’s Race and no Presidential race. Checking the numbers, there were 4,295 people that voted in the 2006 U.S. Senate race in Woodbridge, which I believe was the race with the most votes cast. Simply based on this number, Woodbridge ordered 15% more ballots than they were likely to need and were pretty much on the mark.

In 2006, 20,676 people voted in the U.S. Senate race in Bridgeport. Round it up to the nearest thousand, and you’ve got 21,000 ballots. No margin for error. If they had order 15% extra, they would have had gotten 24,000 ballots and had a much smaller problem.

Yet there is much more to the story. The bigger issue is what do you do when you run low on ballots. If it looks like you are going to run low, you should be paying close attention and place orders. The printers can get ballots to you within a couple of hours. In Woodbridge, we had heavy turnout in the morning and our town officials spoke with officials at the Secretary of the State’s office to determine when and if they should order more ballots. This was before we had a problem, and fortunately, it didn’t develop into a problem. If it did develop into a problem, we could have photocopied ballots and put the town seal on them as a stop gap until additional official ballots were available. This has been a long standing practice. So, Bridgeport’s use of photocopied ballots, providing they were all properly accounted for, should not be an issue.

Yet Bridgeport did not act quickly enough. Was it incompetence or shenanigans? In my opinion, the courts were right to keep the polls open the extra two hours. This is, in part, because of the alleged shenanigans from previous elections in Bridgeport.

In previous elections, Bridgeport has been accused of deliberately not ordering enough ballots in certain districts to suppress the vote in those districts. Some people have suggested that something similar was taking place this time around. Yet if this were the case, keeping the polls open in districts where there were not enough ballots may have been more likely to help Foley and other people challenging the Bridgeport Democratic Party favorites.

What happens now? Well, Registrars had until 8 PM last night to get their counts to the Secretary of the State’s office. Hopefully, we will see these numbers become available so that a clearer view of the results will emerge. If the margin is less than 2000 votes, there will be an automatic recount. Any other sort of recount probably would require court intervention.

Then, towards the end of the month, the Secretary of the State needs to certify the results. Before, and perhaps afterwards, there is likely to be a bit of political wrangling to make sure that all the votes are counted, or at least all the votes for one candidate or another, depending whom one is supporting.

Update: The Hartford Courant is now reporting that the Secretary of the State's office will be releasing results at noon.

11 AM Update:The Secretary of the State's news conference originally scheduled for noon has been postponed until later in the afternoon.

TheValley Independent reports that Oxford and Derby also ran out of ballots. There are unofficial reports that several towns ran short of ballots.