Connecticut’s secretary of the state received a report last month warning that candidates and campaigns involved in Bridgeport’s most recent primary stretched the boundaries of the state’s election laws by seeking to influence people who were using curbside voting to cast a ballot.
The report, which was written by a pair of state election monitors who were hired to oversee the city’s electoral system, said local election officials warned political operatives at one of the city’s polling locations not to swarm the vehicles where voters were using a state-approved process to cast a ballot from their cars.
The two election monitors — Chris Prue, Vernon’s Democratic Registrar of Voters, and Essie Labrot, West Hartford’s former town clerk — explained that candidates and campaign workers were instructed where they could and could not stand as election workers assisted voters in casting a ballot from their vehicles.
And they informed Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas that an attorney stood outside the polling location at the John F. Kennedy Campus the rest of that day to ensure that the political operatives who were on scene weren’t interfering or pressuring voters.
“Cars pull up with multiple voters in the car and candidates/campaign workers surround the car to try and influence voters,” Prue and Labrot wrote. “An attorney was present at this location all afternoon until close, which helped keep order.”
The warnings about the aggressive campaign tactics being used outside polling locations is just the latest issue to arise out of Bridgeport’s elections.
The city found itself at the center of an election scandal last year after a state superior court judge overturned the results of Bridgeport’s Democratic mayoral primary due to what he described as “blatant” evidence of absentee ballot harvesting.
That court decision was prompted by city surveillance footage, which captured multiple people depositing stacks of absentee ballots into drop boxes ahead of the city’s 2023 municipal primary. The absentee ballot scandal also led the state to appoint the election monitors to oversee Bridgeport’s electoral contests this year.
Thomas, who is in her first term as secretary of the state, said she is aware of the concerns that the election monitors reported about curbside voting in Bridgeport.
“There was an instance in August where a moderator did observe sort of that crowding, and the lawyer came out and sort of lingered there, which dissuaded such behavior,” Thomas said.
Thomas said her office is currently discussing whether state lawmakers should pass a new law that specifically prohibits candidates and other political operatives from interjecting as people seek to use curbside voting.
Connecticut law already includes a rule that prohibits anyone from soliciting support or opposition to a candidate or a ballot question within 75 feet of the entrance to a polling location.
The law, however, does not currently spell out exactly how the law applies to curbside voting.
Establishing a specific setback rule for curbside voting, Thomas said, could be more complicated because the parking lots and driveways outside each polling location are different. But she said it is something that is under consideration.
“We are likely to propose it in the coming session,” said Thomas, who also emphasized that voter intimidation is already prohibited under state law.
While the report from the state election monitors brought the issue of curbside voting to the forefront this summer, it’s not the first time that someone has questioned whether political operatives in Bridgeport were improperly influencing people who were voting from their vehicles.
The State Elections Enforcement Commission is also investigating a complaint alleging that Bridgeport city councilman Alfredo Castillo drove people to the polls last year and sat with them in his car as they filled out their ballots.
That complaint, which was lodged by Callie Heilmann, a co-founder of Bridgeport Generation Now, noted that Castillo was one of the candidates on the ballot that those voters were filling out last November during the general election.
“Alfredo Castillo — a candidate for city council who is on the ballot today — has been driving voters to the polls and doing curbside voting with them while he stays in the car,” Heilmann wrote in the complaint, which was initially sent to the secretary of the state and later forwarded to the SEEC.
The complaint said that Castillo was questioned by Bridgeport election officials about his presence in the vehicle while voters were casting their ballots, and he reportedly explained that he was an Uber driver.
Castillo, who did not respond to a phone call for this story, was subsequently captured on a video earlier this year leaning into the window of a vehicle where someone was seeking to cast a ballot using curbside voting.
In that video, which was shared with FOX61 News, Castillo can be seen arguing with a local election worker who was upset that he was interrupting her attempts to help the voter cast a ballot from their vehicle.
Heilmann, whose group has advocated for changes to the state’s election laws in recent years, argued the complaints about absentee ballots and curbside voting in Bridgeport stems from the same problem: the local political culture.
