HARTFORD - Nine cities and towns hit hard by the recent autumn nor’easter are moving or consolidating their polling places for today’s municipal elections because they lacked power or have too much storm damage.
Affected towns include Avon, Bloomfield, Newington, Plymouth, Simsbury, Somers, South Windsor, Stafford, and Vernon.
Officials in the town of Farmington were deciding yesterday whether to go to court and postpone their local election. Power was still out in three of the town’s four polling places, said Democratic Registrar Barbara Brenneman.
Secretary of the State Denise Merrill said the situation is not perfect but that elections would move forward in most of the state’s 169 cities and towns.
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Voters in all but Andover, Bethany, Naugatuck, Union, and Woodbridge are scheduled to elect candidates for local seats, including mayor, first selectman, school board, and zoning board. Those five towns held their elections in May.
“There is no perfect solution to this particular election,’’ said Merrill, whose office has held at least five conference calls with hundreds of registrars of voters and town clerks, giving them guidance on how to run the elections in a difficult situation. “The laws are designed to be flexible under certain circumstances, and this is definitely one of them.’’
Merrill said she has urged local elections officials to preserve as much normalcy as possible.
Polls are scheduled to be open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The storm left more than 800,000 electricity customers without power. By yesterday afternoon, more than 46,500 Connecticut Light and Power customers were still in the dark.
Merrill said she was very proud of local election officials for using creativity and resourcefulness to make sure voters can get to the polls.
She said there were many instances in which election officials from different towns reached out and helped one another, such as printing voter registration lists for towns without power.
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She said local election officials have tried to notify voters about the polling place changes, adding that notices are being posted throughout towns, at local shopping centers, town halls and at the original polling places.
In some cases, she said, a person may be posted at the original polling place to let voters know where they need to go.
Merrill said her office and the State Elections Enforcement Commission would again hold an Election Day hotline, 866-SEEC-INFO, to report problems at the polls.