URANIA WINS

The line of voters waiting at City Hall to vote, at this point the line wound through the atrium of City hall down the front stairs and out the back door of City hall, many of them sent their because the local polling places didn't know how to handle their requests for ballots

 

Four years ago, Urania Petit and the Working Families Party made history in Connecticut when Petit became the first third party registrar of voters elected on her own.Many have criticized the money spent for the third registrar, but the fact is the matter is that Urania is really the only one we are getting our money's worth from..

In a quote from the upset republican Registrar, he said that Petit's salary could fund elections in Hartford. The same could be said for Bramante and his salary. Ask Bramante how many voters he has registered in the last four years, Urania has registered over 10,000.

Yesterdays election operations clearly show how incompetent the Registrar's office is, and this is where I would agree with Bramante, we need better results for the money that is spent in that Office. It is probably the most incompetent operation at City Hall, and that is saying a lot when you look at City government operations. The office is ripe with political cronyism and money spent in a wasteful manner.

  Petit is the only Registrar that came up with budget saving ideas and ways to implement them for the last fiscal year. Unfortunately the Democratic and republican Registrar treat Petit as an outsider , and even though the Council responded to Petit's suggestions, Bramante and Vazquez, the Democratic registrar were financially reckless and proceeded to overspend their budget allocation by a couple hundred thousand dollars this year.

If Bramante wants to point the finger at expenditures, lets look at the Deputy Registrars. Each registrar has a Deputy Registrar they hand pick at a salary of $55,000 dollars a year. The Democratic Deputy, also serves as Clerk of the Senate at the legislature and still collects his full salary from the City, even when he is working full time at the Capitol while the legislature is in session. It would seem that if we can do without the clerk for months at a time, that might not be a position that needs to be filled in the Registrars Office, at least not on a full time basis.

I will be writing more over the next few days about the voting horror stories related to me by disenfranchised voters from Tuesdays election, including the voter who was told she couldn't vote because she was dead, the voter who was told that she couldn't vote because the records showed she had already voted by absentee ballot, even though she hadn't or the voter that was told she couldn't vote because she wasn't on the list, even though she was and the poll worker checking the lists apparently couldn't read.

Jeff Cohen at WNPR has more on the story, you can read it here