Were Botched BoE Election and Canceled Re-Vote Part of a Larger Political Conflict?
Irregularities in voting at the June 17th Town Meeting left town leaders in a quandary as to how to resolve the problem.
Emily Cole says that from her first day on the job as Childrens’ Program Director at the Goshen Public Library, last February, she found politics intruding into her space. To her dismay, she told The Goshen News, 1st Selectman Todd Carusillo called her into his office, closed the door behind them, and told her “I need you to be my eyes and ears in that library and tell me who’s talking about me”, something she found “wildly inappropriate”. She then walked back down the hall to the library and told her coworkers what the 1st Selectman had just said to her.
“This was also in the midst of the Gender Queer scandal,” Cole continued, “so I had written a letter to our Library Board defending our role in the Library regarding safety of children, because we were being accused that the children could not be safe with books like this in our library.” While her letter was well-received, she told us, one Board member, Lynette Miller, “did not like that my letter was received well and this is how this whole thing became what it has turned into. At the RTC (Republican Town Committee) meeting they found out that I’m not a registered Republican, because I don’t affiliate with a party, and they said ‘Well we need to back a person for the Board of Ed’ (BoE) because I don’t have the Republican values to instill into the schools.”
Cole pointed out that the BoE “has never been political in Goshen”, stating that otherwise she never would have run for the Region 6 board, six years ago. She said she didn’t want this to be a political campaign or anything along those lines because “politics does not belong in our schools”.
She characterized a text message that was sent to various Goshen citizens including her husband on June 17th, the day of the Town Meeting and BoE election, as “bashing me with lies about all of our meetings are in executive session, that I ran Leone out of town, all of these just flat-out lies”. She believes that message came from the RTC.
Cole characterized the June 17th vote as a “s***show”. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It was an embarrassment for our town… it was just pure chaos.” Her understanding of why the vote was disqualified was that she had heard there was “one more ballot in the box than the number of names that were crossed off the list”. She said she had spoken with some of that night’s counters who recounted the ballots several times and concluded that the numbers just didn’t add up. Cole said she was told that the counters informed the people running the meeting of the discrepancy, but that they were pressed for vote counts. She said she was told that although informed that the vote was invalid, “they still went ahead and announced them as Ashley being the winner”. Not until after the meeting was adjourned was it said that the vote was not valid.
“It was not handled properly,” Cole said. “They should not have ever announced an actual winner until they investigated that further…”
Cole then told us that the morning after the Town Meeting, Carusillo came into the library and told her that he was happy with her work on the Board but that she should have given him a heads-up that things weren’t good with [Region 20 School Supt.] Chris Leone. “I repeatedly said that any information I may or may not have had would be illegal for me to share with you. And he kept saying ‘Well you still should have told me, I needed to know this, I write the checks for the school.’“
To do so, she would have incriminated herself by violating the rules for executive sessions, and she was unwilling to break the law to give him that information. He then advised her that the revote would be held the following Thursday, to which she responded that the date would conflict with a critical Board of Education meeting scheduled for the same night. According to Cole, Carusillo then just shrugged his shoulders and walked out, and he later told her she would just have to try to find a way to get there. At this point, according to Cole, “This is where all the contradictions come in and the lies.” Cole referred to a Waterbury Republican American article in which Carusillo is quoted as saying he was unaware of the scheduling conflict until the Board of Selectmen’s meeting that evening. The quote that appeared in that paper was as follows: “It was brought to our attention during (the selectmen’s) meeting, but by that time the call for the town meeting had already been written,” Carusillo said. “This wasn’t intentional on our part, despite what some people have been saying.”
Carusillo told The Goshen News that the Board of Ed meeting was not on the Town Clerk’s calendar, so he was unaware of any conflict when he scheduled the revote for the 27th. His account of the Tuesday morning meeting with Emily also ended differently. He confirmed that Emily advised him of the schedule conflict, that morning. He asked her if the Board of Ed could switch it and that she responded “I’ll see what I can do”.
A couple of days later Cole emailed Carusillo to advise that the Board of Education meeting had been moved from Morris to Goshen to accommodate the 3 Goshen board members who would not otherwise have been able to participate. Cole told us that Carusillo’s response was “Oh, I was going to move the vote to Wednesday night,” something she says he had previously claimed he could not do.
Cole said that on the morning of the rescheduled vote, she received a phone call advising her that the vote was going to be canceled that night “because Lynette Miller chose to call the State and challenge the validity of the vote on the morning of the election”. The Town hired a lawyer specializing in election law and as of the time of the interview, no timeline had yet been set for resolution of the challenge.
According to Carusillo, the Elections attorney instructed him to cancel the June 27th vote, because “If the results of the first one come out in favor of Ashley Hall Dadonna and then the second vote comes out in favor of Emily, then there’s going to be a lawsuit, so they advised us not to have the revote, so that’s why I canceled it.” Carusillo acknowledged that everything is now in the hands of the attorney and the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC).
In the meantime, Cole’s previous term has expired, and there now remains an open seat. “All of these behaviors have just damaged our town”, Cole continued. “We’re down a voice on the Board during a crucial time, we’ve lost the Chair position as a town, which I don’t think they realized how much that does mean…so what they were trying to do has backfired.”
Cole had served as Chair of the Board of Education for two years. “It was a very strange feeling…I’ve worked so hard these last two years, I don’t think anyone will understand how much I’ve put into this.” She told us that on Friday, June 28th, “I signed 15 documents with my name on it as the Chair of Region 20, and I created Region 20.” Two days later she had no further position or authority on the Board.
“It seems like the whole campaign against me for the Board of Ed stemmed from a book that [Miller] was trying to ban from our library, and then tried to bring in her political group to back a candidate and make our Board of Ed election, for the very first time in our town, a political position…Politics, religion our own personal beliefs do not belong on the Board of Ed or in our schools. That is not our role.”
Looking to the future, Cole said “No matter how this plays out….I’ve put my heart and soul into trying to create this district for our four communities, for my own children that will benefit from it as well, and even if I’m not a part of it, my only hope is that these four communities can really learn to come together and stop the finger-pointing and casting blame and rally together and act like we’re all on the same team… We are one district now and the kids really deserve to see the adults starting to lead by example for them.”
Note: While preparing this article, The Goshen News reached out to both Ashley Hall Dadonna and Lynette Miller for comments, but no response was received prior to publication.
