The mayor of Connecticut’s largest city said Tuesday that he believes his supporters broke the law in handling absentee ballots, and he doesn’t plan to appeal a judge’s decision to throw out the results of a Democratic primary and possibly rerun the general election.
In a radio interview, Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim denied having anything to do with rule-breaking during the September 12 primary in which some of his campaign supporters were caught on surveillance video stuffing multiple absentee ballots into outdoor collection boxes.
“I’m embarrassed and sorry for what happened to the campaign. Admittedly, I had no knowledge of what was going on,” Ganim told the Lisa Wexler Show on WICC 600AM. He acknowledged that “there were people in the campaign who, you know, violated election laws, as the judge clearly saw from the evidence.
Ganim called on state election officials to do more to curb potential absentee ballot abuse. He also claimed that the violations captured on video weren’t unique to his campaign, and called on his election opponent, John Gomes, to admit that similar problems occurred among his supporters.
“If we’re going to come clean, we have to come clean,” Ganim said. “And that means Gomes needs to come clean.”
Bridgeport’s mayoral election was thrown into chaos shortly after Ganim appeared to beat Gomes, a former member of his administration, by a small margin in the Democratic primary.
Gomes then released footage from city surveillance cameras showing people stuffing reams of absentee ballots into collection bins in apparent violation of Connecticut law, which requires people to drop off their ballots themselves in most circumstances.
A judge later ruled that the videos and other testimony were evidence of ballot “harvesting,” a prohibited practice in which campaign volunteers visit people, persuade them to vote by mail, collect those ballots and turn them in.
The judge ordered a new primary to be held on 23 January, and a new general election to be held on 22 February if necessary.
Despite the judge’s ruling, the general election for mayor went ahead on 7 November, although it didn’t count in the end. Ganim ended up with more votes than Gomes.
Ganim, who served seven years in prison for corruption during his first run for mayor of Bridgeport and won the job back after his release, has pointed to other surveillance videos that raise questions about whether other people were involved in ballot harvesting.
Gomes, however, has denied any such efforts on his behalf.
“The Democratic Town Committee, the machine people, were caught doing it. It was not the Gomes campaign,” his campaign manager, Christine Bartlett-Josie, said in an interview. “The Democratic Town Committee has created a culture that this is the way they operate. And that was to benefit the current administration and the current elected officials. That’s it.”
The State Elections Enforcement Commission is investigating several allegations of irregularities.