Secretary’s office says it can’t safely fix its reporting system before Election Day, leaving local officials to match candidates by hand

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The office of Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas has left local election officials to work around a problem in its own results-reporting system days before Election Day, Republican candidate for Secretary of the State Peter Lumaj said today.

In an October 27 email to registrars of voters, sent during early voting, the Secretary’s Legislation and Elections Administration Division acknowledged that candidates appear in a different order on the tabulator tape than on the data entry screen in the state’s Election Management System (EMS). As a result, city and town officials cannot simply copy numbers from the tape. The office said its IT staff determined EMS could not be reprogrammed at this point without substantial risk. Instead, it suggested towns print and hand-record tally sheets, bring in additional staff and train them before Election Day. The email made all of those steps optional.

This problem follows several errors the Secretary’s office has already acknowledged this year. Incorrect language on a petition form and an unclear election calendar led to two state Supreme Court cases over Democratic primaries for state House in Hartford and Enfield. In Enfield, the court reversed a ruling that had removed a candidate from the ballot and ordered a new primary, which was held September 1 and cost Enfield’s taxpayers over $40,000, Enfield Democrat challenger Tom Tyler said to NBC-30 TV News.

It also undercuts the Secretary’s own assurances. According to CT Insider, her office announced this month that it would support legislation to correct the certified 2022 state Senate results after a polling place in Prospect reported 1,563 votes for a candidate who actually received 563. The error went unnoticed for more than four years, until a state senator caught it. The Secretary’s office has said that kind of data-entry error is no longer possible with the new tabulators introduced in 2025. Yet CT Insider found that Danbury’s reported results for the August 11 Democratic gubernatorial primary added up to 2,074 votes, while turnout statistics showed only 1,956 voters took part. And this week’s email asks town officials to match each candidate’s position on the tape to the screen by hand.

“During this entire campaign, I have been pointing out the problems that need to be fixed in Thomas’s office,” said Lumaj. “But after mistake upon mistake, there is no doubt about Thomas’s incompetence.” 

“Connecticut’s canvass and audit procedures exist to catch errors, but they are a backstop, not an excuse for getting the basics wrong,” Lumaj said. “Telling local registrars to work around this with optional steps days before an election is not a plan. A thousand votes sat wrongly in the certified record for four years in Prospect, and the numbers still don’t add up in Danbury this summer. We shouldn’t be asking tired election workers to take on more manual risk.”

Lumaj called on Thomas to take five steps:

• Make the safeguards a requirement and provide a state-prepared worksheet that matches the tape order.
• Provide state support for any extra staff towns need to bring in.
• Explain publicly how the discrepancy reached early voting before it was caught.
• Commit to verifying the entered results after the election.
• Post the original tabulator tapes online after the election.
• On the last point, Lumaj said the Secretary’s office could create a page on its website, searchable by town, where town election moderators would post photos of the original tapes from every tabulator in that town. Voters, candidates and the media could then see the raw vote numbers and spot tabulation errors without going to each town to request them.

“Secretary Thomas should have all tabulator tapes posted online after the election so the public can identify if discrepancies occurred,” Lumaj said.

If elected, Lumaj said he will order an independent audit of the office’s election administration, including how systems and materials are tested before use, and will publish the findings promptly upon completion of the audit.

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