With a massive influx of mail-in ballots anticipated for the November elections, Guilford officials are trying to get ahead of any challenges and have identified workload and available space as a potential hurdle.

According to Town Clerk Anna Dwyer, the town is likely to run into a crisis of space, even as the state promises to provide equipment and labor costs to process all the ballots, simply due to physical constraints and the large numbers of people voting by mail.

The Aug. 11 state primary saw a record-setting demand for mail-in voting, according to Dwyer, with more than 3,300 requests straining her office. The November election will almost certainly see these numbers increase and will require more work by municipal employees after the state shifted its procedures following issues during the primary.

“With the primary, a lot of people didn’t even get their ballot until after the primary was over because everything was so delayed, and I can’t guarantee that that is not going to happen with this election,” Dwyer said, “because of the enormous amount of ballots that we will be processing. I can’t promise it, especially if people don’t get their application in.”

Assistance at the Ready

The Secretary of the State’s Office has stated it will mail absentee ballot applications to every Connecticut voter between Sept. 8 and 11 and has additionally promised resources and support to municipalities, notably, access to additional computers used to enter data, Dwyer said. She also said the town could draw on additional labor, volunteers mostly, who also helped process ballots during the primary.

The state will reimburse Guilford for labor related to the election, First Selectman Matt Hoey said.

Another big change has been the allocation of labor. During the primary, municipal employees entered data from applications into a system and the actual paper ballots were printed and sent by mailhouses under contract with the state.

But many towns reported issues with these mailhouses, including Guilford. Dwyer said she was informed only 11 days before the election that ballots would not be processed in time, and town employees would have to pick up the slack.

In November, town clerks across the state will be asked both to process as well as print and mail ballots, Dwyer said, a relatively labor-intensive process that also requires more equipment, as well as special envelopes that must be provided by the state and aren’t likely to arrive in Guilford until mid- or late September.

“They knew that this was coming months ago. They should have gotten their act together long before this,” she said.

By state statute, ballots will not be mailed to applicants until Oct. 2 (30 days prior to the election date). The envelopes provided by the state carry an indicia that alerts the postal service to the high priority of the contents.

The town is still determining where the work will be handled—the data entry, filling of envelopes, and coordinating the mailing of many thousands of ballots to residents, according to Dwyer. Crowding is already a significant concern during the pandemic, and by state statute, ballots and applications cannot leave Town Hall and must be kept in secure locations.

“The basic problem still is, where do you put the stuff?” Dywer said. “We have no room here. We have no extra space. There’s no extra rooms in the Town Hall. There’s no unused space. We don’t have a large office, we don’t have a lot of places to put extra people. I could get volunteers in here, but it’s going to be difficult.”

Hoey offered a more optimistic outlook, saying there were at least three conference rooms and the break room in Town Hall that could be used.

“It’s not an emergency situation,” he said. “Once we assess how many people we’re going to bring in, who can fit where...It all depends on how many people we bring. We’ll base it on the demand as we see it.”

The town is currently waiting and watching to see what the need will be before it decides how many resources will be dedicated to the process.

Dwyer said that “you would have to rent a warehouse” to accommodate the number of people and equipment needed to process the ballots. She said there has been no indication that the state might waive the requirement that ballots stay in town halls, and even if they did, managing the coordination of multiple simultaneous tasks, physical security, and technology would all present new problems.

“You can’t just farm this stuff out to different places,” she said.

The Community Center will soon begin offering limited programming, and is additionally reserving rooms for childcare during the schools’ hybrid reopening, according to Parks & Recreation Rick Maynard. Dwyer also said there are no rooms in the library that could serve her needs.

Trying to add more workers into the Town Clerk’s Office could create a safety concern during the pandemic. Some residents will likely want to pick up their ballots in person in addition to those conducting regular business like accessing maps or getting licenses.

“There’s going to be no social distancing here, it’s not going to be safe for us...We’re all going to be packed in here, and we’re going to have people walking in here. Our offices are open,” she said.

Hoey admitted that while a six-foot social distance buffer would be unlikely to happen in these rooms, state guidelines allow this closer contact as long as everyone wears a mask, which is something the town has already allowed “for employee interaction with the public [at Town Hall].”

Dwyer said she had not yet heard of a comprehensive plan for the election generally, and said she would have hoped to have heard more from the Secretary of the State’s Office before now.

“It is complicated,” Dwyer said. “We haven’t even had time to process it really. Because we didn’t even know what was coming. [The state] kind of sat on this for a while...I thought they would do the same thing they did with the primary, with the mail house.”

Hoey said that after a meeting with human resources and other local officials about two weeks ago, the town is “moving along” with its plan for the election, calling it “a challenge.”

“But it’s nothing that I think we can’t handle with a little bit of patience and foresight, thinking about how we do it,” he said.

Dwyer said there is no way to know for certain how many absentee ballots will be cast, but she said she hoped that “at least” half of the town’s approximately 16,000 eligible voters could go to the polls if it was safe.

“They really should consider voting in person if it’s at all possible,” Dwyer said.

Residents can download an absentee ballot application from the town clerk’s website at www.ci.guilford.ct.us.