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Stephanie Thomas sat down with Paul Bass on WNHH and offered Connecticut the same line she has been selling for months: she is a steady hand in a storm someone else created. The storm, in her telling, is always Donald Trump. The calm is always her. The interview in the New Haven Independent is not an accounting of how this Secretary of the State has actually performed, but rather a campaign pitch.
Start with the line she wanted in print. “The headlines would have you believe this [mail-in voting] is partisan,” she said. Then she name-dropped Republican governors who supported mail-in voting. Ron DeSantis “jumped up loud,” she said. Texas and Alabama said mail-in voting was “fine in our state.”
Thomas did not tell the full story or put the Republicans' comments into perspective.
DeSantis did object to a federal ban on mail-in voting that would have hit Florida’s own absentee system. He also said, out loud, that Trump was talking about states that ship ballots into the ether—like California and Nevada—not Florida’s request-based process that includes post-2020 limits. Alabama and Texas still require an excuse. Connecticut, however, just eliminated its excuse requirement on a party-line vote and is running the first "no-excuse" general election under that law this fall. Ballots get issued 31 days out and must be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is not how it is done in Florida, Texas, or Alabama.
She pulled the same move with the SAVE voter eligibility program. The Supreme Court allowed the modified federal citizenship check system to resume. Participation is voluntary, and Thomas is not volunteering. That is her right.
But two days after the ruling, her campaign was already converting the refusal into an “Election Alert” and a fundraising letter. The state’s chief election officer is asking donors to keep her in the job so Connecticut will not use a tool that matches records against immigration and Social Security data. She recites tiny national fraud percentages as if a close local race cannot be swung by a number smaller than a rounding error. She once even said out loud that she thinks zero election fraud is "naive and unrealistic.”
Connecticut has already seen sloppy voter roll maintenance. House Republicans asked her office and DMV to explain how motor-voter would catch a New Jersey-style software mess after a noncitizen sat on the rolls in West Hartford for years. But she would rather dodge the questions, tolerate some amount of election fraud, and talk about Trump instead.
The Department of Justice sued her for the complete statewide voter file. She refused the unredacted identifiers, citing state privacy law. A district judge dismissed the case, and the DOJ appealed. Reasonable people can argue about how much data Washington should hold. They cannot argue that Thomas has made list verification or 100 percent accuracy her priority. Instead, she has made resistance and alignment with Indivisible her brand.
Bridgeport is the smoking gun she keeps dancing around.
The 2019 and 2023 Democrat mayoral primaries produced absentee ballot scandals, a court-ordered redo, surveillance video of a party vice chair feeding stacks of ballots into a box, and a wave of criminal charges against city officials and operatives. Prosecutors described misrepresented eligibility, restricted possession of ballots, and harvesting. Thomas’s office referred complaints and later backed cameras on drop boxes and tighter application rules. Some defendants have pleaded guilty, but one defendant, Alfredo Castillo, blamed the democrat party's "absentee ballot operation."
Per John Gomes' September 29 op-ed in Only in Bridgeport:
Castillo has not stayed quiet in the meantime. He has said, repeatedly and on the record, that he was simply “following the orders of the Democratic Party,” that Bridgeport’s absentee ballot operation benefited “the Bridgeport Mayor, members of Connecticut’s Congressional delegation, and the Governor,” and that “the foot soldiers get whacked” while the people at the top walk away untouched.
Meanwhile, Thomas' own office has not exactly been a model of precision. In August, she admitted two human errors that put Democrat primary fights in front of the Connecticut Supreme Court: wrong language on a petition form and a calendar that failed to flag petition dates for single-town districts. Enfield even got a special primary. That's hardly bringing “order to chaos.”
On Sept. 1, she called a press conference to calm voters about a CNN report that Homeland Security might be looking at noncitizen registrations. She had not called DHS. She did not know if Connecticut was on the list. But she reassured the public anyway. That is not command of the facts. That was spin control.
Bass’s interview lets Thomas define chaos as whatever Washington is doing this week. The true scope of her office is less about national politics and more about strict execution. The SOTS needs to keep the rolls current, make absentee ballots hard to harvest, accurately tell the public the difference between Florida’s rules and Connecticut’s new ones, and use available citizenship tools to ensure ZERO noncitizen voting.
She did none of that on the radio. She ran on calm when she's sitting in the eye of the storm.
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