Susan Bysiewicz

The sheriffs are only political positions of Connecticut county government, which was eliminated in 1960.

Democrats control the Hartford County Sheriff's Department, for example, and of the 288 deputy and special deputy sheriffs working, the Program Review and Investigations Committee found just two Republicans.

Susan Bysiewicz (born September 29, 1961) is an American politician and attorney who has served as the 109th lieutenant governor of Connecticut since 2019.

Bysiewicz was born September 29, 1961, in New Haven and raised on a farm.

The daughter of Stan and Shirley Bysiewicz, she was raised by a Catholic family of Polish and Greek descent in Middletown, Connecticut.

She received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Juris Doctor from Duke University School of Law.

During law school, she wrote Ella: A Biography of Governor Ella Grasso.

She was a part of the largest Freshman class of the state legislature since 1974.

Bysiewicz practiced law in New York City for two years as an associate of White & Case (1986–88).

In 1988 she became associated with the Hartford firm of Robinson & Cole, L.L.C. where she practiced for four years, and then joined the legal department of Aetna where she was employed from 1992 to 1994.

After the redistricting that followed the 1990 Federal Census, she decided to run in the newly redrawn Connecticut's 100th Assembly District, and defeated Republican Joseph Milardo by a margin of 61–39%.

She was elected state representative for the 100th Assembly District of Connecticut for three successive terms starting in 1992, representing until 1998 about 22,000 constituents living in parts of the towns of Middletown (64% of her constituents) and Middlefield (10%), and throughout the town of Durham (26%).

In the House, she investigated the political power of County Sheriffs and Connecticut's last vestige of patronage politics at the local level.

In 1994, she won re-election to a second term with 67% of the vote.

In 1996, she won re-election to a third term with 66% of the vote.

In 1998, Bysiewicz sought the Democratic nomination for Secretary of the State.

At the state Democratic Convention, she lost the party's endorsement for the nomination, to Representative Ellen Scalettar, but won enough delegates' votes to qualify to run for the nomination in a primary.

During the primary campaign she charged her opponent opposed Megan's Law and was soft on sex offenders.

She won both the nomination, and, in the general election in November, the office itself.

She previously served as the 72nd secretary of the state of Connecticut from 1999 to 2011 and a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives from 1993 to 1999.

She won re-election in 2002, but in 2005, while serving, she announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the gubernatorial election of 2006.

She withdrew from that race in September 2005, and on November 7, 2006, won a third term (running through 2010) as Secretary of the State.

In her time as the chief elections officer and business registrar of the state, she has made technology a focus of her administration.

Bysiewicz developed Connecticut's first electronic filing system for voter registration to prevent fraud and encourage registration.

She also instituted an electronic business searching system called CONCORD that allows users to search a database of all the registered companies in the State of Connecticut.

In 2006-07, she implemented new voting technology including adoption of the optical scan machine and a vote-by-phone procedure so that Connecticut voters with disabilities are able to vote securely and independently.

She advocated with success at the legislature for the passage of a constitutional amendment that would allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries.

On January 27, 2009, Bysiewicz made public her intention to seek the Democratic nomination for governor of Connecticut in the 2010 election.

That February, Quinnipiac University conducted a poll in which they asked: "If the Democratic primary for governor were being held today and the candidates were Dannel Malloy, Susan Bysiewicz and Jim Amann, for whom would you vote?"

Of the Democrats who responded, 44% said they would vote for Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, 12% said they would vote for Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy and 4% said they would vote for James Amann, former Speaker of the House.

In a poll conducted by the Susan Bysiewicz gubernatorial exploratory committee in October 2009, support for incumbent governor Jodi Rell fell to 47% in a head-to-head contest with Susan Bysiewicz, who received 41% of the respondents' vote.

When asked how they would vote if the election was held between Rell and Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy, poll respondents said they would vote 52% for Rell and 31% for Malloy.

In Bridgeport alone, those taking part in the poll were asked who they would vote for if the primary were held that day and they said Bysiewicz 31.44 percent, Malloy 14.56 percent.

She was briefly a candidate for governor of Connecticut in 2010, before dropping out to run for Connecticut Attorney General.

On February 7, 2010, the Hartford Courant reported that Attorney General Blumenthal was investigating whether Bysiewicz violated the law by using e-mail addresses obtained by her office in their official duties for campaign use—soliciting campaign support and donations.

In September, both Blumenthal and Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane concluded that she had not broken the law, and that no charges were warranted.

In January 2010 Bysiewicz dropped her bid for governor, choosing to run for attorney general.

She was disqualified from running for the office by the Connecticut Supreme Court and announced in 2011 that she was running for the United States Senate in the 2012 election to replace the retiring Joe Lieberman but lost the Democratic primary to U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, who went on to win the general election.

In 2018, Bysiewicz filed papers to run for governor of Connecticut but withdrew shortly before the Democratic Convention, in order to run for lieutenant governor as Ned Lamont's running mate.

She was nominated for lieutenant governor during the state primary.