District Errors Led To 19 Improper Votes In State Rep Primary

by Laura Glesby

Of the 1,211 voters who cast ballots in a recent contested Democratic primary for state representative, 19 didn’t actually live in the district.

Those19 votes would not have swayed the outcome of now-State Rep. Steve Winter’s victory in August 2024 in his bid to represent the 94th state House district.

The voters in question were caught up in a broader slew of voter roll errors impacting residents across the city whose voter registrations appear to have not been updated to reflect changes in the state’s district maps.

In some places, the problem appears to have persisted for decades. While some of the impacted residents were assigned to vote in districts that became outdated after 2021, others were assigned to vote in districts that had not included their address since 2001.

Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans and city Deputy Corporation Counsel Roderick Williams have so far declined to comment on these voting district errors.

David Norman-Schiff, one of the 19 voters in the August 2024 primary, said he believed he lived in the 94th District ever since moving into his Church Street apartment building in 2016.

The Registrar of Voters office assigned him to vote with 94th District ballots. Politicians sent him mailers intended for 94th District residents. And as of June 16, the state assembly’s “Find Your Legislators” search function continues to indicate that he resides in the 94th District.

Not only did Norman-Schiff vote as a 94th District resident — “I always vote,” he said — but every so often, he would email former 94th District State Rep. Robyn Porter about political concerns.

All this time, however, he resided in the 96th District.

His address has been located in the 96th District for 25 years, ever since the state’s 2001 redistricting effort.

He discovered that he had been voting in the wrong district from an article in the Independent. He said that he hasn’t received any communication from election administrators about the error.

“It’s astonishing to me that this could happen, could persist for several years. It’s also concerning to me that affected voters haven’t been contacted. There hasn’t been an apology,” said Norman-Schiff. “There really isn’t a good explanation of how this happened and how we can make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

Lora Lemosy, another Church Street resident who voted in the 2024 94th District Democratic primary, found out that she has actually been living in the 96th District when a reporter called to ask about it.

“I voted based on the ballot that I was provided,” she said, “because I trust that the people who create those ballots know what the heck they’re doing.”

In total, an analysis by the Secretary of the State’s office found at least 432 New Haven addresses that were assigned to the wrong state House district as of November 2025.

The report indicated that at least 149 of those addresses were improperly assigned to vote in the 94th District, despite actually being located in other districts.

The data did not indicate how many people were registered to vote at those addresses during a competitive 2024 Democratic primary election in that district.

That year, when then-State Rep. Robyn Porter decided not to run for re-election, three contenders ran in a Democratic Primary election for the open 94th District seat: Tarolyn Moore, Abdul Osmanu, and Steve Winter.

Winter won the primary with 350 more votes than Osmanu, the runner-up candidate. (The final tally was 738 votes for Winter, 388 for Osmanu, and 85 for Moore.)

The Independent examined election day cross-off sheets from the impacted polling places: the lists of all the registered voters assigned to each polling place, on which poll workers marked the names of people who voted either in person on election day, via absentee ballot, or via early voting.

Cross-referencing those sheets with the Secretary of the State’s list of impacted addresses, the Independent found 150 voters who did not reside in the 94th District yet who were registered to vote in the state representative primary election in 2024.

Nearly a third of those 150 impacted voters were registered to vote at two Yale dormitories, Morse College and Ezra Stiles College.

Of the 150 voters, 19 were marked on the cross-off sheets as having actually cast a ballot in the 94th District race in 2024.

Each of those 19 voters resided at an address that had not been located within the 94th district since 2001.

“I think it pretty much makes clear that the race wasn’t significantly impacted by this mistake,” wrote Osmanu in a text message when asked about these findings.

While the outcome may not have been impacted, Osmanu wrote, “every error made in election administration is one that feeds pervasive narratives that are harmful to democracy.”

“Here’s to hoping this article does not need to be re-written in 8 years from now when we’re doing redistricting again,” Osmanu added.

Winter echoed the notion that “even though the outcome here isn’t in doubt,” errors can “create doubt, and we want to do everything we can to make sure that people trust the process and believe in the results of the elections.”

“Even one” misdirected voter “is too many, because it erodes faith in the electoral process,” he said.

He expressed optimism that similar errors will be avoided in the future now that the state legislature has funded new GIS-based technology for the Secretary of the State’s office. The technology, which the office expects to implement by the end of the year, will automate the process of checking discrepancies between voting maps and registration lists.

Moore did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.

Norman-Schiff recalled receiving flyers at his address from 94th District candidates in the months leading up to the race between Winter, Osmanu, and Moore.

“Whatever the political campaigns or parties were relying on was also wrong, because I do remember receiving campaign literature from the candidates in that race,” he said.

“The state House districts are not so big,” he added, “and it’s important that legislators know who their constituents are.”