Report on Bridgeport election failures

Bridgeport, Conn. (WTNH) - A special committee gathered to investigate Bridgeport's ballot problems on Election Day 2010 delivered their final report on Thursday. 

News 8 spent a lot of time at the Bridgeport registrars' office in November as they dealt with the effects of running out of ballots, photocopying ballots and changing poll hours.

"Planning, evaluation, an ability to find out if people were trained properly, long hours," explained Nicolas Panuzio, Mayor's Election Advisory Panel, Chair.

Those problems all contributed to the big mess at some Bridgeport polling places on election day. But it all started with the Bridgeport registrars not ordering enough ballots. They photocopied more, but not before some would-be voters gave up and went home. They kept the polls open late and spent 3 days arguing and re-counting ballots before they came up with a final tally. Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch appointed a Mayor's Election Advisory Panel to investigate. The lawyers, community leaders and a former Mayor came up with 67 recommendations.

"We believe there should be set up a central command center that will monitor the election and will have all the problems answered and have the equipment and technology to answer them," Panuzio said.

As well as have better communication, and of course, make sure they have enough ballots. But the panel stressed that was not the only thing that needed correcting. So did Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, who recently proposed legislation to make sure that an election day debacle like this never happens again.

"The tragedy is not so much the kind of structural things we're talking about here. The tragedy is people were turned away from the polls. That's the bottom line," Merrill said.

Secretary Merrill's proposal would force all Registrars to tell the state how many ballots they ordered and would make them all come up with a plan for what to do if they ever run out of ballots.