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In January 2023, Fred DeCaro the Republican Registrar of Voters in Greenwich requested that the Town accept an unusually large $500,000 grant from a Democrat controlled organization called CTCL. CTCL never explained why it chose Greenwich for such a large grant. CTCL also partnered with other left-of-center organizations and issued guidelines for various voting procedures that often favored Democrat voters.
In one keystone example, CTCL issued drop box guidelines that focus on density, “distinct communities” and “equity,” rather than on maximizing accessibility, convenience and utility for all voters.
Recent issues in Connecticut have highlighted drop boxes in ballot harvesting and stuffing schemes, and a Connecticut bill meant to secure the vote passed recently. This bill includes provisions for cameras monitoring drop box locations. Unfortunately, these provisions don’t take effect until 2025, and the bill still leaves the Drop Box locations to the Secretary of State and does little to secure the ballots themselves.
Drop Boxes are expensive and should require monitoring and daily pickups. In 2020 in Pennsylvania, CTCL gave 5x the funding to counties in which Hillary Clinton won in 2016. As a result of the funding, Delaware County, PA with 566k voters who voted only 37% for Trump in 2016, had 47 ballot drop boxes, while Lancaster County, PA with 545k voters who voted 57% for Trump, had only one drop box. There was no video monitoring of drop boxes in 2020 in PA.
The Trump campaign sued over PA drop box policies before the election, but lost the case because it couldn’t produce evidence that these unmonitored drop boxes posed a security risk. So the Trump campaign placed private surveillance cameras which caught multiple voters illegally dropping batches of ballots but this was not pursued by the PA Attorney General.
In 2022 the Pennsylvania senate voted to require 24/7 video surveillance of drop boxes, citing several examples of ballot stuffing in 2021, but this did not become law. However, 28 States, including Pennsylvania did pass laws banning use of private funding for election offices, and Wisconsin voted to amend its constitution to prevent private funding of elections.
Under direction from CTCL and others, Democrats also pushed expanded voting days and methods without providing corresponding expanded security measures.
Much of this information was available to Mr. DeCaro ahead of the RTM vote in January of 2023, but Mr. DeCaro persisted in pursuing the grant and further declined to do due diligence into the the political leanings of the grantor’s directors and leadership, according to a January 16, 2023, email exchange with the Editor of the Greenwich Free Press.
Armed with misinformation from the League of Women Voters, which conflated access with security and claimed CTCL is nonpartisan, the Greenwich Representative Town (RTM) meeting in 2023 voted to accept the CTCL grant by a margin of 4 votes, largely along party lines, with 95% of Democrats voting to accept the grant and 84% of Republicans voting against.
The following Republicans voted to accept this funding:
Ironically the RTM voting system failed to record the votes of six Republicans who were present, including several Republicans who spoke in opposition to the grant and who complained immediately about their vote not being recorded properly on the new voting system.
More recently, Mr. DeCaro disagreed with the alleged illegality of petitions filed by members of the same group of Republicans in favor of accepting the CTCL money on the RTM, including some listed above. Mr. DeCaro then voted at the Republican Town Committee (RTC) in support of the faction that included RTM members who supported the CTCL grant — this group now controls the RTC.
In a final footnote, the latest Town budget also included a 23% pay raise for the Registrar. This raise was passed by Democrats with the help of Republican Harry Fisher who was elected BET Chair, essentially by the Democrats, and who sits on the BET HR committee.
Are all Greenwich Republicans in support of this?
Time will tell.
