News Clips

With an open seat for the first time in 12 years, at least nine candidates are running to become Connecticut’s next Secretary of the State. When three-term incumbent Denise Merrill announced that she was not seeking reelection, the scramble began on both sides of the political aisle because openings for statewide constitutional offices are relatively rare. A total of seven Democrats and two Republicans are interested in running for the job.

A court-appointed special master invited members of Connecticut’s bipartisan redistricting panel Monday to make one last attempt at negotiating the lines of new congressional districts. Last month, the state Supreme Court assigned the special master, Stanford University professor Nathaniel Persily, to draft a plan to ensure each of the state’s five congressional districts have an equal number of residents. The court inherited jurisdiction over the process when the legislature’s Reapportionment Commission failed to come to an agreement.

The Connecticut Supreme Court granted the petition from Connecticut’s bipartisan redistricting panel for more time to complete work on a map of congressional voting districts. The Supreme Court is giving the group until 12 p.m. Dec. 21 to complete their work. However, the court would like the commission to give them an interim report on their progress not later than 5 p.m. on Dec. 15.

Rep. Stephanie Thomas, D-Norwalk, filed papers Tuesday that make her the first Democrat to declare a candidacy for Secretary of the State, a statewide office that will be open in 2022. Thomas, a first-term lawmaker who advocated for early voting and no-excuse absentee ballots as vice chair of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, scheduled a formal announcement Wednesday morning in Norwalk.

"...while Connecticut’s legislative leaders have agreed that the redistricting process so far has been fair, Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause in Connecticut, the election watchdog organization, said the secret aspect of negotiations between Republicans and Democrats isn’t good for public perception of the effort."

"...The legislature is hardly a disinterested body when it comes to election districts. The leadership can use the map to keep members in power or make life difficult for members who don’t toe the line. The number of truly contested races for both houses in every election cycle is a minuscule fraction of the total. The fact that this bipartisan body has pushed out a map with such oddities on it should be setting off alarm bells for anyone interested in fair elections..."