Approximately 659,000 people in Connecticut tried absentee voting this election, many for the first time, due to the pandemic.
Election officials said for the most part, it went off without a hitch.
At the same time, it went down to the wire for towns and cities to count hundreds of thousands of ballots.
At Hartford City Hall, workers got all the 10,000-plus absentee ballots counted.
But not every community though, could get it done in one day.
As soon as the polls opened a team of 36 in Hartford began processing and tabulating thousands of absentee ballots collected for the 2020 election.
The approximately 1,000 extra that were picked up on Election Day could not get processed until all in-person voting ended at 8 p.m.
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“We have to take our official book and double-check to make sure that those folks did not vote in person," Sheila Hall, Hartford's Republican registrar of voters, explained.
Part of the processing also includes finding errors, and having to reject absentee ballots. The Hartford Registrar's Office does not know how many it had to reject, but did know the main reasons behind it.
“More of the common ones would be a family of three decided to put all three ballots in one envelope, or they forgot to sign the actual envelope," Democratic Registrar of Voters Gigi Feliciano said.
While Hartford got its absentee ballot work done election night, a number of towns and cities will come back today for more processing and tabulating, including Waterbury, New Britain, Stamford, and West Hartford.
