Courant staff writer Matt Kauffman crunched some numbers on the Bridgeport voting and found that the roughly 21,000 ballots ordered by Bridgeport officials would have been enough to meet voter demand in only one biennial election in the last 50 years, according to voting data at the Secretary of the State's office.
Eight years ago, 19,588 votes were cast at polling places in Bridgeport, the only biennial election since at least 1960 when fewer than 21,000 Bridgeport residents went to the polls.
But the city eight years ago had 20,000 fewer registered voters than it has today.
In the last mid-term election, in 2006, just under 23,000 Bridgeport residents cast ballots, at a time when the city had 10,000 fewer registered voters than today.
In all recent biennial elections, voter turnout as a percentage of registered voters was far higher than city officials prepared for this year. For Tuesday's election, the city ordered enough ballots to cover about 30 percent of the registered voters. But data show that in the last seven biennial elections, the smallest turnout recorded in the city was 39 percent.
Matching even that minimum percentage would have required about 6,000 more ballots than the city ordered.