How Long Will it Take to recount Second District Votes in Connecticut?
by, Dori Smith
On November 8, 2006 the Secretary of State ordered a recount of Connecticut’s Second District where Democrat Joe Courtney currently leads by 167 votes. Cities have five business days to complete the recount. Results are not expected until next week.
As of 10:30 a.m. Thursday the Town Clerk of Norwich, DeeAnne Brennan, had just received the official written notice of the re-canvass. Her anticipated start date for the recount of all ten Norwich precincts is Monday, November 13, 2006, she said.
The Clerk received calls from a few people wanting to know why her town’s results seemed to come in so late Tuesday night. But unofficial results had been posted on the internet between 10:30 to 10:45. Radio station WTIC was reporting the Norwich results even as TV stations were reporting that they were not out yet as of 11:00 pm.
Incumbent Republican, Rob Simmons, expressed unwillingness to concede the vote because he had been beaten by a narrow margin of less than 200 votes.
Simmons mentioned Norwich in one of his last reports of the evening, saying they couldn’t know the winner because Norwich had not yet come in. He also referred to voting machine problems in Norwich, but DeeAnne Brennan said she didn’t know what he might have been referring to. She had not heard of any serious problems with the Norwich vote, she said.
[...] We turn to the recount of Connecticut’s Second Congressional District once again with part two in our ongoing investigation into voting machine security at towns using the AccuVote Optical Scan machines made by Diebold. The machines were used in 25 towns, ten of which were in the Second District where Democrat Joe Courtney beat incumbent Rob Simmons by a mere 91 votes. [...]