Update from Connecticut
Posted: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 1:45 PM by Mark Murray
From MSNBC’s Chris Jansing
HARTFORD, CT -- More than $30 million dollars has been spent on the Connecticut Senate race -- demolishing the previous record of a little over $7 million. If the secretary of state here is right and there's a record turnout (a morning canvass showed 12 key precincts about 30% ahead of the 2002 election) that's still well over $25 a vote. So much for the theory that negative advertising suppresses voter turnout. The campaigns for Senate and three too-close-to-call House races have been brutal. At least the sun was shining this morning -- it's been a gorgeous New England day with rain in the forecast later.
The morning was not without its problems, however. Voting was briefly stopped at one precinct in West Hartford because ballots had a wrong name on them in a state representative race. Dan Tapper from the secretary of state's office told me voting was stopped "for less than an hour" and everything is up and running now. He couldn't say how many people had been turned away from the polling place. Twenty-nine people voted on machines with the incorrect ballots, and those machines are now locked down.
Also, some bad robo-calls went out from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in places like New London and Old Saybrook. DCCC spokesman Bill Burton confirms the problem, which directed people to their primary polling place, which is different from the general election polling place. He says the calls were stopped as soon as the problem was brought to their attention, corrected, and then resumed with the correct information. He believes "a small number" of the thousands of robo-calls being made in Connecticut were incorrect.
