Connecticut

Connecticut ended county government in 1960, so the Census counts zero county governments — one of only two states, with Rhode Island. In 2022 the Bureau also retired the counties as county-equivalents and replaced them with nine Councils of Governments, so the 2024 gazetteer lists Planning Regions instead. Any join keyed on a Connecticut county FIPS code against post-2022 census geography finds nothing, and any pipeline that assumes a county tier exists between the state and the town has no rows to put in it.

The Secretary of the State's October 17, 2025 registration file gives every town a County — Fairfield, Hartford, Litchfield, Middlesex, New Haven, New London, Tolland, Windham — while the Census government-units file for the same state already uses the nine Planning Regions. Both are current and official. They do not map one-to-one, so a consumer that reads the county from the voter file and joins it to census geography is joining a 1960 administrative fossil to a 2022 planning boundary, and the failure is silent because both sides have plausible names.

1,057,561 of 2,503,192 registrations are Unaffiliated — 42.2%, more than the Democrats at 35.1% and nearly double the Republicans at 21.1%. It is a state of the record, not an organisation, and it is the largest single value in the enrollment column. Software that ranks parties by registration puts a non-party first; software that filters to parties drops 42% of the electorate; and software that treats the largest bloc as a partisan universe is modelling people who declined to join one.

The published minor-party key carries I (Independence), INDA (Independance) and IT (Independent) as three separate codes. The middle one is a misspelling that has become an official key and persists in the current file. Name-based matching merges at least two of the three; fuzzy matching merges all three; and any of those merges silently reassigns real registrations between organisations that are legally distinct.

Glastonbury spans districts 1 and 2, Middletown 1 and 3, Shelton 3 and 4, Torrington 1 and 5, Waterbury 3 and 5. The state's own file records the congressional district as a list rather than a value for those rows, which is why a parser expecting a single integer drops exactly those five towns and produces a statewide total short by 176,195 registrations. A town-to-district relation modelled as many-to-one is wrong for five of 169, and they include the state's fourth-largest town.

Connecticut has ten boroughs — Bantam, Danielson, Fenwick, Groton Long Point, Jewett City, Litchfield, Naugatuck, Newtown, Stonington, Woodmont — and every one of them sits inside a town. In Alaska the identical word names the county-equivalent tier, nineteen of them, each containing municipalities. The same token denotes opposite ends of the ladder in two states, and a tier table keyed on the word alone will file Connecticut's sub-municipal boroughs as counties.

The 2026 calendar sets a Town Committee Primary on March 3, five months before the August 11 state, district and municipal primary and eight months before the November 3 election. It elects party officers rather than public officials, runs on its own absentee and canvass rules, and is a statewide primary day that most models of an election year do not have a slot for. Treating a state as having one primary per cycle misses it entirely.

January 6 for the 25th Assembly District, January 13 for the 139th, February 3 for a Fairfield selectman, February 17 for New Haven's 7th Ward, June 23 for a Middlebury selectman, September 15 for New Haven's 9th Ward. Each is a separate document with its own deadlines, and none of them appears in the November 3 state election calendar. A harvester that treats the state calendar as the calendar misses six elections and every deadline attached to them.