Enough sniping over voting session

3/8/07

As if trying to prove that nothing is too small to provoke a political furor, Trumbull is embroiled in a kerfuffle over a training seminar for optical scanner voting machines.
A session was planned earlier this week to educate voters on how to use the technology, and the Democratic town clerk set up the seminar with the sponsorship of the Trumbull Democratic Women’s Leadership Network. This was a mistake; a session like that should be nonpartisan. But the reaction of Republican Jack Testani, vice chairman of the Republican Town Committee, went over the line.
Testani, who ran unsuccessfully for first selectman and once served on the Board of Finance, said Town Clerk Rose Lodice must apologize, and said “this situation indicates concerns over possible additional situations of misuse of public office.” A simple acknowledgement that a mistake was made ought to be enough.
Optical scanning machines make good sense. They are a welcome update to the rusting lever contraptions used across the state, and have many more safeguards than the much-reviled touch-screen voting technology used elsewhere in the country. Like any system, the potential for problems exists, but overall, it’s a good process.
In Trumbull, the back-and-forth continued on Wednesday with Republicans demanding an apology, attempting to involve the Secretary of the State’s office and threatening an ethics complaint. Enough. The political aspect of voter education ought to be nonexistent. Once the misstep by the town clerk was noticed and rectified, the matter should be closed.
Hopefully, Trumbull will get a chance to use the machines in November in what promises to be an interesting election. But while it seems every year is an election year and all matters are political, some things really aren’t worth wasting time on.