Moore campaign: Write-in candidacy ‘an option'

Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, campaigning for mayor Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, campaigning for mayor Photo: Via Facebook Photo: Via Facebook Image 1 of / 21 Caption Close Moore campaign: Write-in candidacy ‘an option' 1 / 21 Back to Gallery

BRIDGEPORT — The write-in ballot option is typically the preferred voting method of highly disgruntled citizens dissatisfied with their ballot choices, and of pranksters suggesting some implausible individual or fictional character for elected office.

Marilyn Moore and her supporters may try to make the write-in candidate mean something in Bridgeport.

Having lost Tuesday’s Democratic primary to Mayor Joe Ganim by a small margin, but with seemingly no other realistic way onto November’s general election ballot, Moore is seriously considering continuing her campaign to run the city as a write-in.

“That is one of the options that we’re pursuing,” Moore said Thursday night. But, she added, “It’s just not the only option.”

Moore also called for “the state and national Democratic Party, Governor Ned Lamont and state and federal authorities (to) conduct a full investigation of absentee ballots cast in the primary election.” Moore beat Ganim on the voting machines Tuesday, but he won the night with absentee or mail-in ballots.

Moore’s campaign had unsuccessfully asked state elections officials earlier in the summer to better police the use of absentee ballots in Connecticut’s largest city given a long history of abuse and fraud.

“The days of staying silent and therefore complicit in blatant voter fraud in Bridgeport must end now,” Moore said Thursday.

Since January when Moore, a state senator, announced she would challenge Ganim, she had pledged to, one way or another, appear on the November ballot.

Moore, who has a reputation for being independent of Bridgeport’s Democratic movers-and-shakers, as expected lost the endorsement to Ganim when the Democratic Town Committee held its convention in July.

She then successfully gathered the 2,500 signatures of Democratic voters necessary to force Tuesday’s primary with Ganim. But she and her allies, the Working Families Party, all along had a Plan B — collecting the 207 signatures required for her to petition her way onto the general election ballot as the third party’s mayoral contender.

And as of mid-August Moore and the Working Families thought they had achieved the latter.

Then, about two hours before the polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, the Secretary of the State told Hearst Connecticut Media that only 168 of the signatures Moore obtained for November’s petition candidacy were valid, and she would not be on the ballot.

The last minute news was a gut punch to Moore’s campaign, even as Tuesday’s results showed she had bested Ganim on the voting machines. The incumbent salvaged his candidacy with the absentee ballots for an overall narrow victory of 270 votes.

Moore had initially hoped to either prove she had petitioned onto the November ballot or, failing that, wind up on another third party’s ballot line. But as of Tuesday neither of those options seemed realistic, leading the candidate and her advisers to weigh the write-in option as a last resort.

While a write-in win is not impossible — Michael Jarjura won re-election as Waterbury’s mayor in 2005 as a write-in candidate — it is extremely difficult, particularly in heavily-Democrat Bridgeport where the primaries are often the really competitive races, not the general election.