Lawsuit Seeks To Prevent Absentee Ballot Fraud In Hamden Election

HAMDEN, CT — Four Hamden residents, including two Republican candidates for Legislative Council, filed a lawsuit this week against the town clerk and the local registrars of voters in attempt to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming municipal election and preemptively prevent absentee ballot fraud.

The lawsuit, which was filed by Proloy Das of Murtha Cullina, lists Marjorie Bonadies, Tom Figlar, Lynda Burke and Dino Digiorlamo as the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs are seeking to “protect the integrity of the November 5, 2019 municipal election by ensuring that the Town Clerk issues absentee ballot applications only to individuals who have been identified as accountable persons in the absentee ballot application log,” according to the complaint. “This safeguard is necessary to ensure that absentee ballots are used for their intended purposes and that votes are not unlawfully cast.”

According to the complaint, state law requires the town clerk to “maintain a log of all absentee ballot applications provided under this subsection, including the name and address of each person to whom applications are provided and the number of applications provided to each such person."

The complaint claims that the log currently “indicates that hundreds of absentee ballot applications have been issued by the Town Clerk without compliance with the requirement that they be signed out to an accountable individual. Instead, these absentee ballot applications have been identified as being distributed to non-voting institutions within the Town of Hamden, including, but not limited to, Atria Larson Place, Benchmark Senior Living at Hamden, Congregate Housing, Genesis Healthcare — Arden House, and Hamden Health Care Center.”

In a joint statement released Wednesday night, Hamden Mayor Curt Balzano Leng and longtime Town Clerk Vera Morrison called the claims “poorly researched and utterly meritless.”

The request for immediate relief in the case was denied on Wednesday, but a hearing has been scheduled for 2 p.m. on Nov. 4.

Read the full statement from Leng and Morrison below:

From what we have seen of the complaint thus far, any claims of irregularities in the processing of absentee ballot applications by the Town Clerk’s Office are poorly researched and utterly meritless.

The Town Clerk’s Office routinely provides a designated person at Hamden’s nursing homes and senior living facilities with absentee ballot applications. These sequentially numbered absentee ballot applications, not ballots, are then delivered and disseminated to those who may need them.

The designated individual certifies separately to whom the applications were provided, and then returns all applications back to the Town Clerk’s Office, with a distributor’s log, and then prepares the appropriate ballot documentation for administration by the Democratic and Republican Registrars.

This is the procedure outlined in statute and fulfills the goals of providing absentee ballots to those who may not be able to appear in person at the polls due to a disability.

The Republican candidates and campaign officials who submitted this complaint seem to allege that applications for absentee ballots are being sent to these senior care facilities without accountability. This simply isn’t true. Moreover, had the plaintiffs simply called the Town Clerk’s Office for more information, our taxpayers could have been spared the expense of defending this specious legal action.

The goal of our Town Clerk is to ensure that every eligible citizen in Hamden has access to their right to vote, regardless of age, disability or political affiliation and has been doing so for the last 24 years. The plaintiff’s goals remain unclear.