Connecticut House Lawmaker Discovered Winner After Race Called for Opponent

Local official says error is to blame

People cast their ballots at a polling location in Texas, as seen in a file photo. Sergio Flores/Getty Images

Connecticut Republican House Rep. Craig Fishbein was called the loser in a race for his seat until an error was found and it flipped back to him.

The win was previously called for Democrat Jim Jinks, according to the CT Mirror. Wallingford Town Clerk Barbara Thompson told news outlets that her office on Tuesday found that votes hadn’t been recorded in Connecticut’s reporting system at Yalesville Elementary School.

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

The Connecticut Secretary of State’s data says Fishbein is now ahead of Jinks by 21 votes, but a recount will be conducted on Thursday because the margin of error is within 0.50 percent.

“There’s no circumstance when an error like that is not caught and corrected,” Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for the secretary of the state, told the Mirror.

In Michigan, a similar incident was reported in Antrim County where a GOP official’s race was initially called for the Democratic challenger before it was revealed that a software error flipped several thousand votes. Michigan’s Department of State said last week that the clerk didn’t update software that was used to collect voting machine data.

GOP officials, however, expressed concerns in a press conference last week, suggesting that other counties used the same software from Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion Systems has denied the GOP’s allegations.

The incident comes in the midst of lawsuits and allegations of voter fraud and irregularities in several battleground states.