Did voter fraud occur in Connecticut? Peek inside the surprising results

After The Associated Press & other news outlets projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, a frenzy of lawsuits & allegations of widespread voter fraud hit the American public’s radar. Now, court battles in several key swing states are underway. 

While many poll workers & election officials have claimed these voter fraud accusations are baseless, there’s been some legitimate evidence of flaws in the voting system. Thanks to a recent discovery in Connecticut, concerns about counting errors have risen in the 2020 election. Are they widespread? Do they prove larger claims about voter fraud? Let’s take a look.

What happened? 

In Connecticut’s recent election for the Connecticut State House, poll workers initially counted that Democrat Jim Jinks had won the race in the 90th District. 

However, on Nov. 10, Wallingford Town Clerk Barbara Thompson reported her office had found uncounted voting ballots in the reporting system at Yalesville Elementary School, one of nine of the district’s polling places. 

Thompson admitted to The CT Mirror the following day, “I can’t answer if it was a clerical error or a computer error in the elections management system. All I know is we caught it yesterday and amended it.”

After discovering this error and adding those missing votes into the system, officials discovered Connecticut Republican House Representative Craig Fishbein had actually won. “There’s no circumstance when an error like that is not caught and corrected,” Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for Connecticut’s secretary for the state assured the public, The CT Mirror reported. 

After correcting the error, the system reported Fishbein had beaten Jinks by a total of twenty-one votes. Because the difference between the counts were so close, a recount was issued that following Thursday, leading to a final vote tally of a seventeen vote difference, yet still clarifying that Fishbein was the winner. Fishbein ended up with 7,038 votes and Jinks with 7,021 votes. 

Controversy ensues

The CT Mirror reported while Craig Fishbein had initially won the seat after the death of Rep. Mary Fritz in 2016, he was unopposed for re-election in 2020 until June. That month, Fishbein got into some hot water for a social media post, and his retweet allegedly prompted his opponent, Jim Jinks, to run against him. 

Jinks, a Chesire councilman, joined the race against Fishbein after he caused controversy on social media, retweeting a meme of Joe Biden with the caption: “If you aren’t setting fire to buildings, then you ain’t black”. After blowback on social media, Jinks took the meme down per The Hartford Courant. The local newspaper called the meme “racist” when reporting Fishbein’s apology. 

The meme referred to a problematic quote Biden made earlier this year: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”. Fishbein apologized for the post, and was ultimately censured by the Wallingford council. Despite the post, Fishbein still kept his seat this election.

Similar incidents? 

A similar error was made in Antrim County, Michigan where a Democratic candidate was declared the winner of the race before discovering a software error had flipped several thousand votes. Michigan’s Secretary of State reported the clerk didn’t update the software that was used to count up voting tallies, and once recounted, it was declared the GOP official had actually won the election. 

Although GOP officials recently expressed similar concerns, suggesting software from Dominion Voting Systems caused this situation in other counties, Dominion Systems has denied these accusations. 

As the issue of election fraud continues to be a hot topic all around the nation, these discoveries only add more fuel to the fire. Despite election officials & experts in each state asserting that widespread voter fraud claims from the Trump Administration are unfounded, these incidents have surely raised eyebrows. 

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Where do you stand on the ongoing debate of election fraud in the recent election? Do you trust our nation’s voting system? Let us know in the comments.