City Hall Internet Crash Halts Hartford Election Results
“We don’t know what we actually missed in the (election management system),” said Democratic Registrar Giselle Feliciano, after an internet outage at Hartford City Hall paralyzed the city’s election reporting late Tuesday night.
Election officials in Hartford were in the middle of uploading tabulator results into the state’s electronic election management system when the network crashed. The connection did not come back online until around 2 a.m. on Wednesday, leaving the capital city far behind neighboring towns as municipal workers scrambled to re-enter tabulator data from scratch.
Feliciano explained that while the tabulators themselves functioned normally and were unaffected by the outage, the network failure completely disrupted the uploading process.
“While we were working in the system, it shut down the program,” Feliciano said.
By noon on Wednesday, only a handful of communities across Connecticut had yet to report their final results through the Secretary of the State’s online system. While smaller municipalities like North Canaan and Kent also experienced delays, Hartford’s status as the state capital made its absence from the reported totals particularly notable. Under state rules, municipal officials are required to submit election results within 48 hours of the polls closing.
Election staff returned to City Hall early Wednesday morning to re-enter numbers and verify that all data had saved correctly.
“We are all on a couple hours of sleep, so unfortunately everyone has to give us a minute,” Feliciano said.
As of noon on Wednesday, the city had unofficial results ready for same-day registration and early voting. However, Feliciano noted that staff still faced technical hurdles beyond the network crash, remarking dryly, “Not even our damn printer works.”
Towns Run Out of Physical Ballots During High Turnout
Hartford’s technical failure was part of a broader set of administrative hiccups reported across Connecticut on Tuesday night. Multiple towns ran into trouble after running out of physical ballots during high turnout periods.
In Wallingford, election administrators are conducting a discrepancy recount following an operational error. Polling places in the town ran out of standard ballots, forcing officials to print contingency ballots. Although those contingency ballots were required to be kept separate and counted by hand, they were erroneously fed directly into the town’s tabulators.
“There were a few towns that underestimated the number of same day registration ballots or early voting or even absentee voting,” Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas told WFSB on Tuesday night. “Pero the good news is there is always a plan for that, so we were able to keep on going.”
Thomas also confirmed that election authorities referred two complaints to the State Elections Enforcement Commission regarding individuals attempting to vote twice.
“There was one person that we know for sure because they admitted to it, when they tried to cast the second ballot they were of course caught and they said ‘oh, I was testing the system,'” Thomas said. “But that is a crime.”
State and local election workers continue processing outstanding tallies as the 48-hour reporting window progresses.
