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Secretary of the State Involves Essex Students in Election Audit

Connecting what they learn in the classroom to real life applications, students at the Essex Elementary School (EES) got a treat last week as Secretary of the State Denise Merrill and Essex resident Deputy Secretary of the State James Spallone visited the school to enlist the children to help select voting precincts from the Nov. 3 Municipal Elections for post-election audits.

“This is something we have to do after every election,” said Spallone. “We started doing random drawings for post election audits in the mid 2000s, after we started using the optical scan voting machines.”

He added, “The law requires that 10 percent of the voting precincts need to be chosen for a hand-counted audit. This used to be something we did at the capitol, but last year we decided to bring it to the schools as an opportunity to involve the children.”

Last year’s ceremony was held in Hebron, where staff attorney Ted Bromley has children in the school system. Because Spallone has children at Essex Elementary School, this school was chosen for the honor this year.

“I am so glad we decided to bring this ceremony into the schools and in front of students,” said Merrill. “It is a successful way to give children a lesson in civics and geography while having fun and teaching them more about Connecticut, the voting process, and democracy.”

She added, “It is a personal pet peeve of mine that civics and government is no longer taught in the classroom in most elementary schools because it not part of the ‘test.’ I believe that one of our primary reasons for educating people is so they know how their government works and anything we can do to teach children more about democracy is a good thing.”

All 4th grade classes, along with one 2nd grade class, gathered in the cafeteria to help Merrill choose 68 out of the 674 polling places in Connecticut to be part of the audit.

“My job, that you students will be helping me with today, is to make sure that the elections are fair in every town and the machines are working correctly,” Merrill said.

Each child got the opportunity to choose from a large drum filled with tiny pieces of paper with each polling place written on it. As they chose the locations, they then, with the help of a staff attorney , mapped the location on the large state of Connecticut map.

“Today I learned that there are 169 towns in the state of Connecticut,” said 4th grader Chloe Porcaro, who pulled Waterbury for her town for the audit.

Her classmate, Charlie Whelan, who pulled Prospect for his town, said he didn’t know, before this ceremony, that some towns had more than one polling place.

“Our 4th grade students are studying Connecticut right now, so we thought this was a great way to bring in additional learning about the state we live in and give our students an opportunity to participate in a special event,” said EES Principal Scott Jeffrey.

Superintendent of Schools Dr. Ruth Levy said, “This is a fantastic opportunity for our children to learn firsthand about the electoral process and meet some of the people who are elected to the state positions.”

In addition to the 68 polling places that where picked at random by the students, an additional 15 alternates needed to be chosen, so teachers and administrators got in line to pick a place from the golden drum. As luck would have it, the last up, EES Assistant Principal Jennifer Tousignant, pulled out the town of Essex—a perfect way to end a unique educational experience for the students.