Everyone Is Angry at the New York City Board of Elections

By Jillian Jorgensen • 04/25/16 3:05pm

It hasn’t exactly been a banner week for the New York City Board of Elections, and it’s only Monday.

The fallout of a problem-plagued presidential primary last week continued today with an offer of $20 million in extra city funding from Mayor Bill de Blasio—but only if the board cleans up its act. That would include making “systemic changes” based on recommendations from an outside consultant and publicly posting all job vacancies, improving poll worker staffing with better pay and better training, and communicating more clearly with voters about poll sites, election days and registration statuses.


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Assemblyman Luis Sepulveda, meanwhile, is seeking to make it a felony to purge voters from the rolls—unless the person is “proven” to be dead or have moved away. (Last week, the BOE Executive Director Micheal Ryan told the Observer that people were removed from the rolls for moving out of Brooklyn, or if their mail from the BOE was bounced back by the United States Postal Service—including a group of 70,000 voters who had previously been tagged on rolls as “inactive voters” and did not respond to intent to cancel notices from the board.)

“There was no verification process,” Mr. Sepulveda said, “and that’s why you have the large number of complaints. When you’re talking about 126,000 voters, I find it very difficult to believe that each person was either no longer living in the district, living in Brooklyn, or they’re deceased.”


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Still, Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh argued that the board’s mistakes were increasingly being seen as more than just incompetence.

“We’re increasingly focusing on them as issues of equity and issues of voting rights—not just incompetence or mistakes that are made,” Mr. Kavanagh said. “The mistakes that are made, whether they are intentional or unintentional, have become systemic. And we need change at the Board of Elections.”

Read more:
http://observer.com/2016/04/everyone-is-angry-at-the-new-york-city-board-of-elections/