“We have evidence of people who received absentee ballot applications who have been deceased for more than a decade,” Romano said, adding that the ballots are supposed to be sent only to active voters. “We found an example of a voter in Enfield who had voted — it was a clerical error — and he had been dead since 2012, and someone accidentally checked his name off. … Who is checking the signatures? Who is checking all of this paperwork that is coming back?”
He predicted there will be problems in races with tight results.
“We end up in court, it seems, every election,” Romano said.
But Merrill and others have noted that instances of absentee ballot fraud are exceedingly rare. There have been 1.5 million absentee ballots cast in Connecticut in the past 30 years and fewer than 20 convictions for absentee ballot fraud, officials said.