In Torrington, a broken tabulator machine held up the completion of ballot counting until Wednesday, though Republican Molly Spino declared victory over Democrat Stephen Ivain in the open mayoral race on Tuesday. Spino defeated Ivain 3,986 votes to 3,442, according to the unofficial results.
In Southbury, the town clerk's office reported a slow working tabulator machine delayed the counting of early votes. Once all the counting got done, Democratic Selectman Tim O'Neil defeated Republican First Selectman Jeffrey Manville 3,201 votes to 2,985 votes in a rematch in the town's top race, according to the unofficial results
In Hamden, a broken tabulator in one voting district required the ballots be counted by hand. While that was happening, Democrat Adam Sendroff declared victory in the four-way race for mayor. The unofficial results posted later had Sendroff winning with 8,518 vote and Republican Jonathan Katz finishing second with 3,839 votes.
In Norwalk, the tabulators performed well, but a programming glitch related to cross-endorsements of Democratic and Republican candidates by the Working Families and Independent parties caused some problems, including Democratic mayoral winner Barbara Symth.
"The tabulators work fine," said Stuart W. Wells, Democratic registrar of voters. "We spent a good deal of time learning about them and we know how to work them."
The programming problem did not crop during the September primary elections because there were no cross endorsements in those closed party contests, he said.
The cross endorsements in the open general election created data entry issues that affected the tallying and entering results in the state reporting system because the program was unable total the votes because it did not recognize votes of cross-endorsed candidates when accumulating vote totals, he said.
As a result, Wells said 5,600 votes had to be entered individually into the state reporting system and that took 16 hours to get done.
"So, basically it gives us nothing to report because there's nothing to total until we've entered all of this stuff," he said.
Wells said he is confident that the secretary of state's office will work out the programming hiccup for the 2026 elections for governor, Congress and state legislature.
Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas reported on Tuesday evening just after polls closed that voting had gone "pretty smoothly."
Overall, registrars of voters across the state reported the new voting tabulators performed well but not without some problems that are to be expected with the deployment of new technology, said Barbara Richardson Crouch, the Republican registrar in Sprague and president of the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut.
"There were a few glitches, but nothing really that rose to the level continuing issues throughout the entire state," she said Wednesday.
There were a few calls regarding voting machine malfunctions and voters being directed to place ballots in auxiliary bins of tabulators that went down that were made to a state hotline for voters to report any difficulties they encounter casting ballots during Election Day, said Joshua Foley, a staff attorney with the State Elections Enforcement Commission. While not untypical, the reports were low compared to previous elections, he said.
"There were some glitchy mechanics with the machines and their reading of the ballots, which is only understandable because they are new machines and they are still calibrating," Foley said.
The secretary of the state's office spent most of a $25 million bond issue on new ballot tabulators for the 169 cities and towns to replace aging and outdated optical scan machines that had become unreliable and unserviceable after 20 years of use.
Election Systems & Software was selected out of four vendors competing to supply the new generation of paper-based electronic voting machines in September 2024. A team of computer scientists, professors and researchers at the University of Connecticut Voting Technology Research Lab tested the ES&S machines for the secretary of the state's office and gave voting system high marks for the security of their hardware and software
The new machines had a limited test run in the 2024 presidential election in nine cities and towns: Glastonbury, Hamden, New Britain, New Haven, Rocky Hill, Southington, South Windsor, Vernon, and Wethersfield. The 2025 municipal elections were the first to use them statewide.
Richardson Crouch said the new vote tabulators worked well in Sprague. There were some issues with ballots being marked too lightly so the machines could not read them initially and voters had to remark their ballots a little darker, she said. In these cases, when vote tabulators signaled that a ballot could not be read, it was not clear that it was because voters filled them out too lightly.
"When you see it say unable to read the ballot, you go into a panic. So, we pulled out the handy manual and realized what that meant," Richardson Crouch said.
In other places, she heard that voters had marked two-sided ballots so heavily that the marks came through on both sides and replacement ballots had to be filled out.
The secretary of the state's office had advised local election officials to use ballpoint pens for making out ballots, but a common problem reported Tuesday was municipalities using a different pen than recommended to mark ballots, and the ink not drying completely before being fed into the machine.
"We'll learn how to adapt to the technology," Richardson Crouch said.
One challenge is that ballots have to be run through four different tabulators depending on how they were cast, Richardson Crouch and Wells said. There was one each for early in-person ballots cast, in-person ballots cast at polling places on Election Day, ballots cast by voters who registered on Election Day, and absentee ballots.
The secretary of the state's office will be reaching out registrars of voters and municipal clerks in the coming weeks to hear how election administration went in their towns and cities and learn about any issues that arose with the new tabulators and voting and what improvements could be made, said Roger Senserrich, the assistant communications director for Thomas.
© 2025 the New Haven Register (New Haven, Conn.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
