Mayor wins second primary school, after an autumn race marred by voting abuse

Joe Ganim, the longtime mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, won the city's Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday — months after winning the general election and an earlier primary.

The Associated Press called the race in Mr. Ganim's favor shortly before midnight. With almost all votes counted, Mr Ganim was ahead of his challenger, John Gomes, with 55.9 percent to 44.1 percent.

The results followed a strange and lengthy election season in Connecticut's largest city, caused by a voter fraud scandal.

During the first Democratic primaries, held last September, Mayor Ganim defeated Gomes by 251 votes. But a judge overturned the results in November after videos emerged showing the mayor's supporters making repeated trips to drop off boxes and stuffing them with stacks of absentee ballots.

The amount of mishandled ballots “casts the outcome of the primary into serious doubt,” Judge William Clark wrote in his decision.

Judge Clark ordered that a new primary be held but said he had no authority to stop the general election, which was held days after his ruling.

Mayor Ganim won the general election; Mr Gomes came second, running as an independent. But the mayor was not sworn in.

New general elections are now scheduled for February 27.

Mayor Ganim predicted optimism about the primary election early Tuesday evening, even though only a small number of votes had been counted.

On stage at his campaign party at a downtown Bridgeport bar before 9 p.m., Mr. Ganim thanked “thousands and thousands” of the city's residents, who he said voted for him “overwhelmingly.”

Mr. Gomes said early on Tuesday that he would not run as an independent candidate in the new general election if Mayor Ganim won the Democratic primary. However, on Tuesday evening he said he might change his mind.

“We are not 100 percent satisfied with the results coming in,” Mr Gomes said.

Even as the polls reopened this week for new primaries, Mr. Ganim and Mr. Gomes traded fresh accusations of election cheating.

“Yesterday we reported that a voter's ballot had been mailed a week after her death,” Mr. Gomes said Tuesday morning. “We filed a lawsuit against them for stealing an election.”

In response, Mr. Ganim said the Gomes campaign had received applications for absentee primaries “and was handing them out like candy.”

Connecticut's secretary of state had stationed two election monitors in Bridgeport for the past 30 days, where they reviewed video of activity around the polls and conducted hundreds of spot checks on absentee voters.

The observers referred seven cases of possible election interference to the State Elections Enforcement Commission, which has the authority to investigate.

“I had received reports that people were afraid of intimidation and coercion,” Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas said at a news conference.

Before Election Day, the office recruited more than a dozen attorneys and election law experts to volunteer at polling places in Bridgeport.

The bickering and accusations of election tampering have led many residents to renounce politics. In a city of 150,000, only 8,173 people voted in the primaries last fall.

“It's hard to trust when trust has been broken so many times,” said Nicole Smickle, 37, a home care aide who voted for Mr. Ganim on Tuesday.

Bridgeport has long been plagued by allegations of election irregularities, most notably the mishandling of absentee ballots by supporters of political candidates. In interviews and court testimony, residents of the city's low-income housing complexes have described how people walked through their apartment buildings, pressuring them to request ballots they were not legally entitled to, and sometimes even filling out the applications and returned the ballots for them – all of which is illegal.

In June, the State Elections Enforcement Commission said there was evidence possible crime during the 2019 mayoral elections. In 2017 a judge ordered a Democratic primary for a rerun of City Council seats after a single absentee ballot, improperly handled, decided the race. And a judge in 2022 ordered a new Democratic primary in a state representative race over allegations of absentee ballot fraud.

“There is a massive cover-up that has been going on for decades,” said Jack Hennessy, the incumbent in the 2022 race, who lost. “There is a pattern here, year after year. It is only because of the videos that we are having this discussion.”

Mayor Ganim — who served seven years in prison on federal corruption charges and then regained the mayor's post in 2015 — has repeatedly lost the in-person vote, but has subsequently defeated his competition in absentee votes.

Ms Thomas, the Foreign Secretary, noted that the election season had been unusual.

“It's a bit strange, of course,” she said. “But I think in this case it was necessary to restore voters' confidence.”