Capitol Building in Hartford. Photo: Michael Marciano.

Connecticut's enactment of public financing of state elections in 2010 made it a national leader in election law reform. But in recent years the state has failed to modernize its cumbersome election apparatus causing it to lose ground to other states in making it easier for our residents both to register to vote and to cast a ballot on Election Day.

As a result, the state's election apparatus during the 2016 statewide election was unable to handle the crush of actual and potential new voters at the polls. The General Assembly in 2019 debated but failed to enact effective remedies for these problems. The shocking sight of massive election-night lines of new registrants blocked from voting is expected to occur again during the upcoming 2020 presidential election unless our elected representatives make a more serious effort now to repair the operating system of our state's democracy.

For this reason, the Connecticut Law Tribune Editorial Board joins with other civic organizations in calling on Gov. Ned Lamont and state legislators to hold a special session to debate and enact several key election law reforms. During the 2019 session, the House approved an amended version of the major voting reform bill recommended by Lamont (HB 7160, as amended) May 28 by a party-line vote of 85-60. But opponents threatened to filibuster the bill, and it died on the Senate calendar.

The justification for renewing legislative consideration of reforms is a special session setting would deprive reform opponents of the "talk it to death" leverage that empowers any minority of legislators with the effective power to block the will of the majority as the legislative clock moves toward midnight.

We recommend that the call for a special session should focus on two voter-centric reform priorities.

First, the state should adopt full automatic voter registration, as 16 other states and the District of Columbia have done, including Massachusetts and New Jersey. The goal of AVR is to make it easier to register to vote in an efficient and voter-friendly manner while reducing paperwork and expense for municipal registrars of voters. Senate Bill 24, the AVR bill in the 2019 session, was approved by the government and administration committee but never taken up by the full state Senate.

Connecticut currently employs AVR at the Department of Motor Vehicles pursuant to the federal National Voter Registration Act. When residents visit an office of the Department of Motor Vehicles to register a vehicle or apply for a driver's license, for example, they are automatically registered to vote unless they opt out of registering. Since the "Motor Voter" program began, the DMV has processed 265,000 new voter registrations and 170,000 voter registration changes, according to the Secretary of State's office.

Under a full AVR system, the number of participating state agencies could be expanded beyond the DMV to include sites such as public libraries, offices providing state-funded programs for people with disabilities, public institutions of higher education, unemployment assistance offices, fishing and hunting licensing bureaus and public assistance offices.

Second, the state should enable residents who appear at a registration site to take advantage of Connecticut's Election Day Registration program to exercise their new opportunity to vote as long as they are in line by the 8 p.m. voting site deadline.

Currently, registered voters who are in line at a polling site by 8 p.m. on election night must be allowed to vote. But EDR applicants, even if they are already in line to register, must be fully registered by the local officials by an 8 p.m. deadline or they are not allowed to vote. This discrepancy between the 8 p.m. actual registration deadline and the 8 p.m. in-line voting deadline caused election night chaos at the University of Connecticut main campus and in New Haven and other municipalities in the 2018 state election.

The fix is simple: Extend the "in-line by 8 p.m." standard to participants in the EDR program. This is a commonsense reform the state should take to handle the expected crush of voter interest in the 2020 presidential election.

An additional change to lessen the impact of synching up the "in-line by 8 p.m." deadlines is to authorize the secretary of state to increase the number of EDR sites in each municipality beyond the current single site, per expected voter demand.