Watch | Local leaders react to Trump’s Executive Order to overhaul elections

As published by WTNH News 8 – “Local leaders react to Trump’s Executive Order to overhaul elections”

HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) — State lawmakers on the legislative committee that oversees Connecticut’s election laws responded to President Donald Trump’s executive order on voting.

State Sen. Rob Sampson, the top Republican senator on the elections committee, offered a full-throated endorsement of the order.

“I support any effort to try and improve the quality of our elections and make sure that only lawful, legitimate people are actually participating in our election process,” Sampson said.

But State Rep. Matt Blumenthal, the Democrat who co-chairs the elections committee, pushed back forcefully on the order.

“This would be the biggest disenfranchisement of voters since Jim Crow,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal said the order’s requirement that voters show documentary proof of citizenship in order to be able to vote would rip the franchise away from a large swath of voters — including those who do not have the requisite documentation or those whose name might not be the same on the documentation that they do have. Married voters who have assumed the surname of their spouse might have their right to vote imperiled, Blumenthal said.

In the debate over election regulations, Connecticut has attracted national attention for a pair of recent ballot scandals in the state’s largest city. Prosecutors have brought hundreds of charges of ballot crimes against Democratic campaign operatives for alleged misconduct in Bridgeport’s two most recent mayoral elections.

The 2023 mayoral election was upended after leaked city surveillance footage appeared to show campaign operatives placing multiple items into absentee ballot drop boxes. A judge ruled that footage threw the election’s result into question and ordered new votes.

“The volume of ballots so mishandled is such that it calls the result of the primary election in serious doubt,” the judge wrote in a ruling in the 2023 case.

Sampson and his fellow Republicans have repeatedly invoked the 2023 election — which fit with longstanding accusations of systematic misconduct in Bridgeport elections — when calling for additional voting regulations at the state and federal level.

“We have big problems in Connecticut,” Sampson said. “Everyone knows it and frankly the Democrats in the state legislature here have no interest in fixing the problem, so I don’t blame the president for trying to create some pressure to make that happen.”

Blumenthal pushed back on the notion that the Bridgeport charges demonstrate a need for more ballot restrictions.

Last year, he ushered through a package of reforms to the state’s absentee ballot laws. The measures included including additional monitoring of the absentee ballot process and expedited the process of investigating alleged ballot crimes.

Far from a blinking red light, Blumenthal argued that the charges indicate an effective system.

“That is a sign that the laws we’ve passed are working,” Blumenthal said.