Voter fraud was on Patrick J. Argenti’s mind when he arrived to cast his ballot in Fairfield last Monday, the first day of early voting. The 74-year-old Republican came with three forms of identification and worrying news from Whitfield County, Ga., that he’d just heard from a retired cop at a local gym.
A ballot marking machine had produced a paper ballot marked for Kamala Harris, but the voter insisted she had chosen Donald J. Trump. The story took flight on social media, boosted by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, on Infowars.
“Did you hear about it?” he asked.
Greene breathed new life into debunked claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines changed Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in 2020, an element of Dominion’s defamation suit that ended with Fox News paying $787 million in damages. Greene quickly was contradicted by election officials, including the Republican secretary of the state.
Argenti wasn’t so sure.
“It sows the distrust,” said Dru Georgiadis, 62, a Democrat who exited the polling place behind Argenti. A member of the town’s Representative Town Meeting, she has long been active in politics.
She and Argenti ended up in an amiable chat about the reliability of voting, social media — and gossip at the local gym. She expressed confidence in the first, not so much in the second or third.
Argenti and Georgiadis stand on opposites of sides of an astonishingly wide partisan divide in America — one that is even bigger in Connecticut — over the degree to which people are confident that votes in the 2024 presidential election will be counted accurately.
Gallup reported last month that 57% of Americans are very or somewhat confident in an accurate count, and a poll of Connecticut voters conducted for The Connecticut Mirror found an even higher number — 67%. But behind those numbers was what Gallup says is a growing and record-high partisan divide.
The overall confidence numbers tracked by Gallup were relatively stable from 2020 to 2024, but only because an increasing number of Democrats and unaffiliated say they trust the vote, while Republican confidence waned. The split was 84% to 28%, or 56 percentage points.
The partisan divide was even wider in Connecticut. The CT Mirror poll found 93% of Democrats and 62% of unaffiliated voters were very or somewhat confident of the national vote, compared to only 27% of Republicans — a 66-point difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Republicans were more confident about how accurate votes would be counted in Connecticut, but there remained a significant partisan divide: 97% of Democrats were confident, but only 50% of Republicans.
One sign of the times is that the Independent Party of Connecticut required candidates seeking its endorsement this year to sign a statement denouncing the assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 and pledging to accept all election results as certified by election officials.
“It’s a symptom of how sick our democracy is and how sick the Republican Party is, that the Independent Party needs to ask for a pledge to respect the results of our election,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District. “I mean, that’s like asking people to sign a pledge that you’re not going to throw little old ladies off of roofs.”
Two dozen Republican candidates for the General Assembly signed the pledge to get cross-endorsements by the Independent Party, including Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield. Harding noted the pledge did not mention Trump by name but spoke broadly to a peaceful transfer of power.
Himes, who says he was one of the last people in the the House chamber when it was evacuated by armed security during the Jan. 6 assault, said there is a direct link in voter mistrust of elections to Trump continuing claims that the election was stolen and the effort to violently stop the certification of Biden’s victory.
On his way to safety, Himes passed by scores of protesters under arrest.
“There were some bad people there that day, no question,” Himes said. “The folks I saw, you would meet at the supermarket, but they had been so perverted by a lie that the election was stolen that they were willing to attack police officers and break windows and threaten to kill people. And so this notion that our elections are fraudulent is a huge chink in our democratic armor, and it’s being very deliberately promulgated by Trump and his minions.”
There is another partisan divide in Connecticut over whether “the future of democracy in America” is an issue of concern. It is to significant majorities of Democratic and unaffiliated voters, 75% and 61%, respectively. Only 38% of Republicans share the concern.
The two tracks of voter concerns — Republicans’ distrust of election results, and Democrats’ fears about democracy — may be parallel, but Himes insisted they are objectively different. Trump refuses to accept certified voting results and has threatened to use the government to punish his enemies.
“Donald Trump, very objectively, referred to his political opponents as ‘the enemy from within’ and has talked about a day of dictatorship,” Himes said. “And then there’s the utter zero evidence, just truth-free bullshit, that our elections are compromised. So this is not a symmetrical thing.”
Voter fraud and election irregularities, of course, do exist.
In Connecticut, Bridgeport is a constant source of allegations, most recently over what appeared to be the substantial harvesting of absentee ballots, in the Democratic mayoral primary. A Democratic town chair in Stamford was convicted of stealing absentee ballots.
But a wide range of practitioners in both parties, as well as long-established outside groups who monitor elections, such as the Brennan Law Center, said there is no evidence of the widespread fraud repeatedly claimed by Trump. U.S. elections are decentralized, run by local or county governments.
Connecticut is home to Fight Voter Fraud, a nonprofit that has grown in little more than five years from a modestly funded, frequent filer of unsuccessful election complaints in the state to an organization with a national profile and an anonymous donor base that provides more than $1 million annually.
“We’re now in all 50 states — our data, our evidence,” said Linda Szynkowicz of Middletown, the group’s founder and president.
Annual revenue has gone from $217,340, as reported in its first tax filing in 2020, to $1.7 million in 2022 and $1.1 million in 2023. Szynkowicz’s compensation went from $17,308 in the 2022 filing to $196,279 in 2023. Her home is the group’s mailing address, but she has a staff and an office in a location she declines to share.
“I prefer not, because we have a lot of crazies,” she said.
She is a cheerful and quotable woman, a welcome guest on talk radio in Connecticut and the national “War Room” podcast founded by Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to Trump. She is part of an ecosystem promoting the idea that voter fraud is prevalent.
She does not just talk about fraud, she teaches how to take action. On an Oct. 7 appearance, she advised how to challenge suspect voters in Georgia, a swing state won by Biden in 2020.
“Go to our website, download the request data so you can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting in your county, and you can actually hang on to those,” Szynkowicz said during the Oct. 7 episode. “Do your due diligence. We’ll even teach you how to do it.”
Bannon was not her interviewer. He is serving a four-month prison sentence at the federal prison in Danbury, the penalty for ignoring a subpoena to testify before the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6. He is scheduled to be released Tuesday, a week before Election Day.
The Brennan Center for Justice says the threat of challenges can be intimidating to voters, depressing turnout.
“Voters may become afraid when they learn their name is on a list submitted to the government or they get a notice that their right to vote is in jeopardy,” wrote Andrew Garber, the center’s counsel. “Challenges also spread disinformation when people use challenges as ‘proof’ that ineligible people are voting. No state’s rolls are perfect, but there is no evidence to support such claims in Georgia or elsewhere.”
Nonsense, says Szynkowicz. The system should be able to withstand and even welcome reasonable challenges.
Szynkowicz, a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives in losing campaigns in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020, is well known to registrars of voters, the State Elections Enforcement Commission and state and local law enforcement. She frequently offers what she says is evidence of voters registered and voting in more than one place. It has not been a productive relationship.
She said she reached out to the chief state’s attorney before the 2018 election with evidence of irregularities.
“They told me to go to the State Elections Enforcement Commission, which is absolutely useless. Then I reached out to the FBI,” she said. They agreed to a meeting, then canceled, she said.
“That was the day I came up with Fight Voter Fraud,” she said. “And now, six years later, we’re national. I’ve got over 61,000 people I have evidence on that violated election laws. We’ve done the work of law enforcement Connecticut — the dead people on the voter rolls, 7,748 deceased voters that were on voter rolls in 2020, 542 of them actually voted, some in person.”
Garber of the Brennan Center warns that mass challenges of voters can overwhelm election officials while rarely turning up actual fraud.
“A 2022 challenge to 37,000 voters in Gwinnett County forced 5 to 10 election staffers to work ‘all day, every day, six days a week’ for multiple weeks and did not turn up a single ineligible voter,” Garber wrote.
In Connecticut, the State Elections Enforcement Commission repeatedly has concluded the complaints Szynkowicz filed on behalf of Fight Voter Fraud were unfounded, whether they were claims of votes cast by individuals before they were registered, or after they were dead.
In 2021, she filed a complaint alleging 5,742 people were allowed to vote in the Nov. 3, 2020 election when they had not registered until “days, weeks or event months later.” Attached to the complaint was a 128-page spreadsheet with the names of voters with a “privilege date” of later than Nov. 3, which she interpreted as the date by which they could vote.
It was not, SEEC said. The date referred to the last time their file was updated on the statewide system. The commission’s investigators found no one who voted improperly. In fact, many had been registered for years, if not decades. Similarly, it concluded that the appearance of the dead voting was the result of wrong names checked off the polls.
In an admonishing footnote, the commission said it would “strongly encourage those who hold themselves out as authorities on election law investigations to inform themselves on both the facts and law of the complaints they filed with the Commission to avoid the waste of the limited investigatory resources of the Commission.”
Dominic Rapini, who won a Republican primary in 2022 for secretary of the state, the office that oversees elections in Connecticut, has joined Szynkowicz in many complaints. He said the complaints were intended to force actions to increase voter confidence in elections, not undermine it.
Inaction, he said, only leads to “a festering wound.”
Szynkowicz said all their complaints have turned on analyzing state records, looking for anomalies and evidence of suspicious voting. She said she has refrained from getting into the allegations about voting machines in other states, though she says she is no fan of Dominion.
In the Whitfield County, Ga., incident that troubled Patrick Argenti, the Dominion machine was found to be working correctly, officials said. The single voter to have a problem evidently made an error and was allowed to correctly mark a new ballot. Contrary to what Greene posted, the machine did not repeatedly produce an incorrectly marked ballot, the officials said.
“She posted based on information that was incorrect,” Stephen “Sparky” Kelehear, the chairman of the county elections board, told a news station, Local 3. “Social media sometimes creates problems where they are not, and I think that’s exactly what happened in this case.”
Himes said he sees no way to quickly close the partisan divide over faith in U.S. elections.
“The question is, how can I speak to people who are blind to the real threat to our democracy and obsessed with a lie?” Himes said. “And that’s really hard, you know, because it involves reaching out and listening to people who are of the mindset that I saw so vividly on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Chris Prue, the Democratic registrar of voters in Vernon and president of the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut, said his answer is time, transparency and paper ballots.
“The best part of Connecticut’s system is everything has a paper backup and everything is verifiable,” Prue said. Every state but Louisiana now uses paper ballots, though voters in a few states, like Georgia, use machines to mark them.
On Friday, at the end of the first five days of early voting in Connecticut, he said some voters had inquired about the safety of their early ballots. He told them that state law dictates they remain in a lockbox, secured at night in a safe.
“We try to be as transparent as possible,” Prue said. “I invite them to come back on Election Day and see the process when we open the safe.”
This story was originally published in the Connecticut Mirror Oct. 27, 2024.