Amount of written testimony on Connecticut bills has surged, with more anonymous messages
Connecticut lawmakers have received a sharp rise in written testimony during the 2026 legislative session, alongside a steady increase in submissions that do not identify the author. The Connecticut General Assembly reported that more than 43,800 pieces of written testimony were submitted during the session—nearly a 250% increase compared with 2016—while this year included 7,878 anonymous submissions. The data has prompted legislators to question whether they can accurately gauge who is speaking and what that means for public hearings.
House Majority Leader Rep. Jason Rojas said he has been noticing the volume and anonymity of submissions as he reads bills that come out of the legislature. Rojas described the problem as both an identification challenge and a workload issue, noting that without names it becomes difficult to judge what kind of submissions lawmakers are seeing. He added that he has wondered whether some anonymous testimony could come from chatbots rather than individual residents.
Rojas pointed to the structure of the state’s submission process, saying anonymous testimony can inflate the numbers he and other legislators see. “I saw a lot of anonymous testimonies submitted. It’s fine that somebody has expressed an opinion, but I don’t know if that’s a chat bot sending in 57 pieces of testimony,” Rojas said. “When it doesn’t have a name, that’s a challenge too, and I think that has had the effect of inflating the overall numbers that we get.”
The Office of Legislative Management said the state’s online testimony form, which allows people to add a name, title and organization but does not require it, was implemented in 2022. The office said written testimony has also been accepted via email since 2007 and can be submitted by mail as well, and that anonymous testimony has always been allowed. But because the online form includes a box that autofills the name fields as “Anonymous,” the office said the current process can make anonymity easier for submitters.
Data provided in the reporting shows how anonymity has grown over time. In 2017, only 11 of about 23,000 written testimony pieces were anonymously submitted. That number rose and then surpassed 100 for the first time in 2021, and in 2026, 7,878 pieces of written testimony—about 18% of everything submitted—came from anonymous sources. The reporting also noted that the figure does not include testimony submitted under pseudonyms, which it said likely means it understates the full extent of non-identified messaging.
For individual bills, anonymous volume can be especially high. Rep. Cristin McCarthy Vahey, a Democrat from Fairfield, said she heard and read testimony on H.B. 5044, a bill that would protect vaccine accessibility. Vahey said the bill received 1,098 pieces of anonymous testimony, nearly 29% of all written testimony on the measure and the highest count among bills introduced during the 2026 session. She said navigating the volume took time, describing a concern about whether she might have repeated earlier testimony while clicking through submissions. “Just clicking through actually took a pretty significant amount of time just because there are thousands of pieces of testimony,” Vahey said. “I believe that I read them all … there were so many anonymous pieces of testimony when I was clicking through, I was wanting to make sure that I wasn’t repeating.”
Beyond individual measures, broader counts have raised concerns about how legislators interpret what they receive. The reporting said last year nearly 18% of all testimony submitted was anonymous, citing a Connecticut Mirror analysis. It also said it is difficult to determine which pieces of testimony are written by chatbots or researched using artificial intelligence, though researchers said automation is only one possible factor among several. Seth Warner, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Political Science, said the increase might not reflect a simple rise in individual civic engagement.
Warner said the pattern is more consistent with organized political activity, even if lawmakers cannot always trace it to identifiable authors. “It’s nice to have this Schoolhouse Rock image of people sitting down at the kitchen table and seeing what the Connecticut legislature is doing and finding a bill that they think is interesting and writing testimony out of a sense of civic duty,” Warner said. “But I would say that the vast majority of 43,000 pieces of written testimony are based on some sort of organized political activity.”
Warner suggested the tools used to draft testimony could play a contributing role in the growth of submissions overall, even if they are not necessarily writing the testimony automatically. “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.”
Other researchers pointed to how national politics has increasingly touched state legislation. Sawyer Rogers, a political science Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, said the rise in testimony can be attributed in part to national interest groups taking a larger role in state political debates. Rogers said these organizations may send out “canned messages” and encourage members to submit testimony in response. Rogers also linked the pattern to how social media can amplify political messaging and make it easier to coordinate participation.
The reporting described how this nationalized involvement can show up in bills that have become more politicized at the federal level, including issues involving guns, vaccines, immigration and homeschooling. It said those bills saw more testimony and, in turn, more of it submitted anonymously. Rogers said social media efforts can contribute to the trend by making it easier for people to share messages that prompt additional submissions, including from legislators and from state or localized groups.
Not all organized testimony is out-of-state. The reporting highlighted local activism as one source of high volume. The Rev. Jocelyn Gardner Spencer, who leads the Greater Hartford Interfaith Action Alliance, said her organization reaches out to member congregations to identify major issues in the Hartford area and to gather stories that can become the basis for testimony. Spencer said once the group identifies an issue, it trains members to submit testimony as part of the public hearing process and also creates guides explaining the legislative response.
In addition to faith groups, the reporting said other associations, unions and employers in Connecticut organize people to testify when bills affect their interests. Warner said he was asked twice to testify at the Capitol during the last session by both UConn and his faculty union. He said many people may find written testimony to be relatively easy to provide because it can be done quickly, even when their organizations have a position before the legislature.
Rojas said the anonymity and volume of testimony have become a burden in practice because it is difficult to determine which submissions come from Connecticut residents. “You could certainly make your way through it all to try to find the identity and the location of the person submitting it, but that creates a barrier for legislators to actually hear from their constituents,” Rojas said. He also said some legislators have discussed limiting out-of-state testimony, though he worried that could cut off voices from experts and researchers in other states.
Rojas said he had not given much thought to restricting anonymous testimony in the way lawmakers sometimes do for out-of-state submissions. He said he was unsure whether limiting or banning it would have a downside, adding that he did not yet have a clear answer. “Folks have definitely been like, ‘Why are we accepting anonymous testimony?’” Rojas said. “I’d want to think about, is there a downside to limiting it, banning it? Can we even do that? I don’t know.”
The surge in written submissions has become intertwined with a broader challenge for Connecticut’s public process: hearing a large number of voices on politically charged issues while dealing with increasing numbers of messages that do not identify who is behind them. The state’s official process allows anonymity, but legislators say the combination of scale and non-identification makes it harder to interpret the intent and credibility of the testimony they receive.
This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.