Superior Court Judge William F. Clark will hear Democratic mayoral candidate John Gomes’s court challenge of last week’s primary won by Mayor Joe Ganim by 251 votes. See his LinkedIn page here
A status conference with lawyers assigned to the case will take place Friday morning to sort out potential witnesses and evidentiary exhibits.
Attorney William Bloss, representing Gomes, is asking all video surveillance associated with absentee drop boxes that will emerge crucial in the judge’s determination, both in what the videos capture as well as the numerical contents.
Even if those videos implicate Gomes’s political operatives on the public relations side it could play into Bloss’s legal arguments that the sheer number of drop-box ballots from those unauthorized to enter them, makes it impossible to determine an accurate primary vote outcome.
State law limits the touching of absentee ballots to generally immediate family, caretakers and police officers.
Several videos leaked to the Gomes campaign from inside the Police Department show a woman dropping what appear to be absentee ballots into an in-box container fronting the Margaret Morton Government Center.
Clark was nominated to the bench by Governor Ned Lamont in 2021
Clark is a former law partner at the firm Berchem and Moses in Milford. He also practiced law at Lynch, Traub, Keefe and Errante in New Haven. He was Chief Operating Officer for Waterbury Public Schools, responsible for managing the Board of Education’s non-curricular departments and handling a wide variety of fiscal and legal matters for the school system, including employment and collective bargaining matters, business transactions, contracts and negotiations, regulatory compliance, and education law. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer for New Haven Public Schools.
He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, and his Juris Doctor degree from Quinnipiac University School of Law.
Ban the drop Box !