Woodbury’s Republican registrar says she will not run another election with her Democrat counterpart after he allegedly altered official returns in the state’s election system right before the window to fix them closed.
Lisa Amatruda, Woodbury’s Republican Registrar of Voters, put the allegations in writing on September 11. Her letter to Republican Town Committee (RTC) Chairman Paul Luchetti and the Woodbury RTC details a chain-of-custody complaint regarding the Democrat Registrar of Voters, Daniel Lonegan.
On August 11, Woodbury ran two primaries. Amatruda wrote that when they left the Senior Community Center that night, candidate totals on both ballots had been counted, reviewed, and verified as correct. Democrat Registrar Daniel Lonegan and the head moderator then entered those results into the Secretary of the State’s Elections Management System (EMS). However, Amatruda spotted one problem: absentee totals were placed in the wrong column. Because the return had already been submitted, the Secretary of the State (SOTS) had to unlock the system before a correction could be made. That did not happen that night.
On August 12, Lonegan and the moderator filed an amendment for each primary and fixed the absentee columns. Amatruda checked the four candidate totals again and confirmed everything was correct. She assumed the rest of the process was just standard housekeeping.
It was not.
On August 27, a friend sent Amatruda a Facebook screenshot indicating that she and the moderator were being sued.
During meetings on August 28 and 29, Amatruda learned for the first time that Lonegan had logged back into the EMS by himself on August 13 and August 20. They discovered at least 13 amendments to the moderator’s returns, affecting both results pages and statistics pages. These statistics cover how ballots were cast—including poll tabulators, early voting, and absentee hand counts—which are kept in fields separate from candidate totals. Amatruda stated that Lonegan admitted to the changes, explaining that he had signed in using the head moderator’s credentials, called it a mistake, and could not explain why the results themselves were touched instead of only completing the statistics fields.
By then, Amatruda wrote, what the EMS showed—and therefore what appeared on the Secretary of the State’s website—was no longer correct. Lonegan asked the SOTS to unlock the return on August 29. On August 31, elections officials stated that they were past the open window, and follow-up communications confirmed the returns could no longer be changed.
Amatruda’s core point is one she believes Hartford will try to bury: she is not claiming the winners flipped. Instead, she is claiming that official, state-facing returns were altered after the fact by a single registrar working alone under another official’s login, and those records were left uncorrected.
Hellbound and Down 