Crank It Out!

Crank it out!

Something happened.

When I went to my first meeting for passing the non-discrimination bill here in Connecticut back in 2007, one takeaway that was brought home at the meeting was: if a legislator tells you how they are going to vote... believe them!

Fast forward to 2026... they now tell you what you want to hear and vote the way they are told to vote.

Also, when I first started giving testimony, it had to be in person. Now they allow online testimony. When I give testimony, I say my name and the district I am in. But now, many testify anonymously and you don't even know if they are actually from Connecticut!

Amount of public testimony on bills is growing, but who’s writing it?

CT Mirror

by Sasha Allen and Angela Eichhorst

May 22, 2026

The amount of public testimony — signed and anonymous — submitted on proposed Connecticut bills has risen sharply in recent years, but the reasons why are murky.

More than 43,800 pieces of written testimony were submitted during the 2026 legislative session, nearly a 250% increase compared to 2016. But this year, almost 8,000 of these submissions were anonymous, and much of the testimony was directed at bills addressing hot-button issues.

Bills dealing with homeschooling, vaccines and gun regulations received more than 2,000 pieces of written testimony each, according to the Connecticut General Assembly. While this year saw abnormally high counts of written testimony overall, these numbers have been climbing for decades.

How many were from Connecticut? How many were generated by PACs?

I remember when I went to a training given by a local lobbyist. One thing the legislators did when they received emails on a topic was sort them by subject line. All of those with the same subject line got filed in the circular file, because those are the ones you "just click" on to send. Those that they give the most weight to are the personal emails. (Hint: if you are going to click on one of those form emails, change the subject line and personalize the email.)

But since more and more testimony is submitted anonymously, it is difficult to determine specific factors behind the increase. Last year, nearly 18% of all testimony submitted was anonymous, according to a CT Mirror analysis.

Hopefully, they give them about as much credence as they did back at the turn of the century. But now comes a new challenge with AI!

It is difficult to determine which pieces of testimony are written by chat bots or researched using AI. But Warner believes the tool could be a contributing factor to overall submission increases.

“That’s not to say that the AI has written the testimony but somebody felt like they had a position but wasn’t quite sure how to articulate themselves,” Warner said. “It could be a waypoint between having the idea and being able to put pen to paper, digitally speaking.”

I am concerned about this. Legislators do listen to constituents, but how much weight they ascribe to them is debatable.

But should anonymous testimony be allowed? Should out-of-state testimony also be allowed? My thoughts are yes, but there should be some type of flag to indicate that they are out of state and that they are human.