(Scroll down to the bottom for updates and a PDF of the Secretary of the State’s statement.)

This is crazy. Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz and Superior Court Judge Marshall Berger just ruled that polls in my fair city of  Bridgeport will remain open until 10 p.m. Why? Because we don’t have enough ballots. Because lines are forming around polling stations in town. And because there are people who allegedly cast illegal votes because panicked workers photocopied ballots.

According to some of my fave news sources, Mayor Finch went to the state this evening to ask for two more hours of voting in Bridgeport because only 21,000 ballots were ordered. We have upwards of 60,000 registered voters in Bridgeport. How, exactly, could too few ballots be ordered after President Barack Obama was in town Saturday, whipping up the crowds? When we have so many close races and so many reasons to want to vote? The same news sources say that GOP chairman Chris Healy filed a complaint about the photocopied ballots.

Bysiewicz is allowing poll workers to photocopy the ballots (although the state is apparently doing some of the copying because we aren’t able to copy enough of them in town), but those will have to be counted by hand – the way the absentee ballots are counted.

This is not the last we’ve heard of this. I hope the newly-elected registrars of voters are going to be ready to start sorting this mess tomorrow. I may be updating this later, because news like this is crack to me. Read more