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Screenshots, ERIC logo, and Stephanie Thomas per CT-N Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram Hartford will share your information with a private data club. It will not let the United States check whether the people on the list are supposed to be there. Then it tells you signature checks are outdated because a sixty-eight-year-old does not sign like an eighteen-year-old. That last part is the tell. Nobody serious is comparing your absentee envelope to a high-school yearbook. Let's slow this down. Connecticut belongs to a multi-state outfit called the Electronic Registration Information Center. Drop the alphabet soup. Call it what it is: a private club of secretaries of state. Member states ship voter files and motor-vehicle records to the club at least every sixty days. Names. Addresses. Dates of birth. Driver's license numbers. The last four digits of Social Security numbers. The sensitive pieces are supposed to be scrambled first so the club's staff cannot read them like a phone book. The names and street addresses are not scrambled. Those are how you mail people. Connecticut does this. Stephanie Thomas's own office said so in federal court. The state uses the club's reports to flag the dead and the duplicates and sends those lists to the towns. Fine. Cleaning lists is a real job. Here is the part they skip on the morning shows. For years, joining that club also meant you agreed to contact people the computer said looked eligible to vote but were not registered. Government databases. Taxpayer mail. A registration drive dressed up as maintenance. The man who built the club, David Becker, later ran a second nonprofit that took tens of millions from Mark Zuckerberg's world and studied those same mailers. Some member states handed that second group lists drawn from the club. I have not seen a public Connecticut document that says Hartford dumped its own file on Becker's second shop. I have seen Connecticut feed the first shop and then act shocked when anyone asks who else drank from the pipe. Now flip the camera. The Justice Department asked Connecticut for the statewide voter list with the same basic identity fields — name, birth date, address, license number or last four of Social Security — in readable form, not scrambled. Not the full nine-digit number. The last four. The same digits Help America Vote already treats as the federal identifier when you register. Thomas and Attorney General William Tong said no. State law, they said, makes those numbers confidential. 'Shall not be disclosed to any person.' Tong called the lawsuit an attempt to 'manipulate' the rolls. Lamont stood next to them and talked about people, paper, and proof. People, paper, and proof. Nice line. It does not explain why the same numbers can leave Hartford for a D.C. nonprofit and cannot leave Hartford for the Department of Justice. That is not a privacy principle. That is a guest list. If the fear is a national dossier, say that. If the fear is Donald Trump, say that. Do not tell the towns this is about protecting Grandma's Social Security number when you already hashed that number and sent it to a club that also generates lists of people to register. The federal government issued the number. Social Security already has the full nine digits. What Justice wanted was the match: this last four belongs to this registered voter at this address. That pairing is how you find the dead still listed, the person registered in two states, the name that should never have been added at the DMV window. Connecticut Republicans asked a simple question after New Jersey admitted thousands of noncitizens hit the rolls through motor-vehicle software. How do we know our version of that pipeline is clean? They asked for an audit of the handoff between Motor Vehicles and the Secretary of the State. The answer from the third floor is always some version of trust us. We canvas. We get death lists. We use the club. We have UConn scan a sample of ballots after Election Day. That last one is the shell game. A tabulator audit asks whether the machine counted the paper in the bin. It does not ask whether the name on the list should have been there. Those are different jobs. Mixing them on purpose is how you keep people calm without answering the question. Then there is the signature. On Brian and Company, Thomas said states are moving away from signature verification because your signature at sixty-eight is not the same as when you were eighteen. Lamont said the same family of thing at a July press conference. Discredited technology. False positives. States that adopted it are getting rid of it. Are we comparing signatures fifty years apart? No. That is the dodge. A real check compares the mark on this year's envelope to the mark already on file — the registration card, the license, the last absentee application. Last year. Last month. Not 1976. Banks do this. Notaries do this. The post office does this when the money order looks off. Your hand changes. That is why the file is supposed to be current. That is why you update the card when you renew the license. If the only argument against checking the envelope is 'people get old,' you have admitted you do not want a check. You want a story that sounds humane so you can skip the work. Connecticut already skips most of that work. The Courant asked years ago what signature they compare on an absentee ballot. The honest answer then was there is no comparison. You sign the inner envelope under penalty of false statement. Missing signature can be cured. Mismatch to a file copy is not the system. Republicans keep bringing bills to require a match. The majority keeps killing them. This spring Lamont signed no-excuse absentee for everybody. More ballots moving through the mail. Weaker reason to show up. And the people in charge are telling you the one cheap check used by dozens of other states is too primitive because handwriting ages. Bridgeport already showed you what happens when absentee paper is treated like a suggestion. Applications. Drop boxes. Harvesting. A city that cannot find the voters after the fact. The elections commission shrugs. The Secretary talks about access. The Governor talks about proof. Proof of what? Look at the pattern, not the press release. Thomas compared a federal citizenship order to the SS in front of the registrars, then apologized for the word and not the reflex. She and Lamont turned a messy identity question after a fatal crash into a lecture about conservative Facebook. Tong wins a dismissal on a statute and treats it as a moral victory instead of a paperwork fight. None of that proves the rolls are dirty. All of it proves they would rather police the question than answer it. Does any of this 'prove' Connecticut must have its rolls checked? It proves something plainer. If the list is as clean as they say, a check does not hurt them. If the club is good enough to receive hashed last-fours every sixty days, the United States is not a lesser recipient by definition. If signature drift is the reason we cannot match an envelope to a current card, then say you do not want mail ballots authenticated. Do not hide behind a teenager's autograph. Connecticut is expanding the easiest way to vote at a distance while shrinking the ways you confirm the voter is real. It will share identity data with a private compact that also feeds registration outreach. It will not share a readable version of the same fields with Justice. It will audit machines and call that an audit of the people on the list. It will mock the idea of matching a signature to the file you already keep. You do not need a conspiracy board for that. You need a memory. The folks listening know the difference between cleaning a list and padding one. They know the difference between a current signature and a ghost from 1958. They know when 'privacy' means we share it with our friends. And they know that a state sure of its rolls does not spend this much energy making sure nobody is allowed to look. 'NO AD' subscription for CDM! Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!' Page 2 Screenshots, ERIC logo, and Stephanie Thomas per CT-N Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram Hartford will share your information with a private data club. It will not let the United States check whether the people on the list are supposed to be there. Then it tells you signature checks are outdated because a sixty-eight-year-old does not sign like an eighteen-year-old. That last part is the tell. Nobody serious is comparing your absentee envelope to a high-school yearbook. Let's slow this down. Connecticut belongs to a multi-state outfit called the Electronic Registration Information Center. Drop the alphabet soup. Call it what it is: a private club of secretaries of state. Member states ship voter files and motor-vehicle records to the club at least every sixty days. Names. Addresses. Dates of birth. Driver's license numbers. The last four digits of Social Security numbers. The sensitive pieces are supposed to be scrambled first so the club's staff cannot read them like a phone book. The names and street addresses are not scrambled. Those are how you mail people. Connecticut does this. Stephanie Thomas's own office said so in federal court. The state uses the club's reports to flag the dead and the duplicates and sends those lists to the towns. Fine. Cleaning lists is a real job. Here is the part they skip on the morning shows. For years, joining that club also meant you agreed to contact people the computer said looked eligible to vote but were not registered. Government databases. Taxpayer mail. A registration drive dressed up as maintenance. The man who built the club, David Becker, later ran a second nonprofit that took tens of millions from Mark Zuckerberg's world and studied those same mailers. Some member states handed that second group lists drawn from the club. I have not seen a public Connecticut document that says Hartford dumped its own file on Becker's second shop. I have seen Connecticut feed the first shop and then act shocked when anyone asks who else drank from the pipe. Now flip the camera. The Justice Department asked Connecticut for the statewide voter list with the same basic identity fields — name, birth date, address, license number or last four of Social Security — in readable form, not scrambled. Not the full nine-digit number. The last four. The same digits Help America Vote already treats as the federal identifier when you register. Thomas and Attorney General William Tong said no. State law, they said, makes those numbers confidential. 'Shall not be disclosed to any person.' Tong called the lawsuit an attempt to 'manipulate' the rolls. Lamont stood next to them and talked about people, paper, and proof. People, paper, and proof. Nice line. It does not explain why the same numbers can leave Hartford for a D.C. nonprofit and cannot leave Hartford for the Department of Justice. That is not a privacy principle. That is a guest list. If the fear is a national dossier, say that. If the fear is Donald Trump, say that. Do not tell the towns this is about protecting Grandma's Social Security number when you already hashed that number and sent it to a club that also generates lists of people to register. The federal government issued the number. Social Security already has the full nine digits. What Justice wanted was the match: this last four belongs to this registered voter at this address. That pairing is how you find the dead still listed, the person registered in two states, the name that should never have been added at the DMV window. Connecticut Republicans asked a simple question after New Jersey admitted thousands of noncitizens hit the rolls through motor-vehicle software. How do we know our version of that pipeline is clean? They asked for an audit of the handoff between Motor Vehicles and the Secretary of the State. The answer from the third floor is always some version of trust us. We canvas. We get death lists. We use the club. We have UConn scan a sample of ballots after Election Day. That last one is the shell game. A tabulator audit asks whether the machine counted the paper in the bin. It does not ask whether the name on the list should have been there. Those are different jobs. Mixing them on purpose is how you keep people calm without answering the question. Then there is the signature. On Brian and Company, Thomas said states are moving away from signature verification because your signature at sixty-eight is not the same as when you were eighteen. Lamont said the same family of thing at a July press conference. Discredited technology. False positives. States that adopted it are getting rid of it. Are we comparing signatures fifty years apart? No. That is the dodge. A real check compares the mark on this year's envelope to the mark already on file — the registration card, the license, the last absentee application. Last year. Last month. Not 1976. Banks do this. Notaries do this. The post office does this when the money order looks off. Your hand changes. That is why the file is supposed to be current. That is why you update the card when you renew the license. If the only argument against checking the envelope is 'people get old,' you have admitted you do not want a check. You want a story that sounds humane so you can skip the work. Connecticut already skips most of that work. The Courant asked years ago what signature they compare on an absentee ballot. The honest answer then was there is no comparison. You sign the inner envelope under penalty of false statement. Missing signature can be cured. Mismatch to a file copy is not the system. Republicans keep bringing bills to require a match. The majority keeps killing them. This spring Lamont signed no-excuse absentee for everybody. More ballots moving through the mail. Weaker reason to show up. And the people in charge are telling you the one cheap check used by dozens of other states is too primitive because handwriting ages. Bridgeport already showed you what happens when absentee paper is treated like a suggestion. Applications. Drop boxes. Harvesting. A city that cannot find the voters after the fact. The elections commission shrugs. The Secretary talks about access. The Governor talks about proof. Proof of what? Look at the pattern, not the press release. Thomas compared a federal citizenship order to the SS in front of the registrars, then apologized for the word and not the reflex. She and Lamont turned a messy identity question after a fatal crash into a lecture about conservative Facebook. Tong wins a dismissal on a statute and treats it as a moral victory instead of a paperwork fight. None of that proves the rolls are dirty. All of it proves they would rather police the question than answer it. Does any of this 'prove' Connecticut must have its rolls checked? It proves something plainer. If the list is as clean as they say, a check does not hurt them. If the club is good enough to receive hashed last-fours every sixty days, the United States is not a lesser recipient by definition. If signature drift is the reason we cannot match an envelope to a current card, then say you do not want mail ballots authenticated. Do not hide behind a teenager's autograph. Connecticut is expanding the easiest way to vote at a distance while shrinking the ways you confirm the voter is real. It will share identity data with a private compact that also feeds registration outreach. It will not share a readable version of the same fields with Justice. It will audit machines and call that an audit of the people on the list. It will mock the idea of matching a signature to the file you already keep. You do not need a conspiracy board for that. You need a memory. The folks listening know the difference between cleaning a list and padding one. They know the difference between a current signature and a ghost from 1958. They know when 'privacy' means we share it with our friends. And they know that a state sure of its rolls does not spend this much energy making sure nobody is allowed to look. 'NO AD' subscription for CDM! Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!' Page 3