New Yorker: "Even in a state that has long been considered, by those who keep track of such things, one of the worst in the country when it comes to election administration—the basic civic business of collecting and counting votes—New York City stands out.
...On Wednesday morning, advocates of election reform held a conference call with reporters to emphasize that the board’s error wasn’t related to ranked-choice voting. “The discrepancy was due to human error, not any problem with the scanners, or the ranked-choice voting technology—this was a mistake by a low-level junior staffer,” Susan Lerner, the executive director of the New York chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group, said...” (A Board of Elections spokesperson later confirmed to me that a junior staff member in Queens had forgotten to hit “clear” in the vote-counting software.)
...Lerner and other reformers have advocated for taking control of the board out of the hands of party officials, and professionalizing the system by hiring nonpartisan election administrators. But lawmakers in both Albany and New York City have largely ignored these calls... Stu Loeser, who served as Michael Bloomberg’s spokesperson when he attempted to push such reforms as mayor, compared incumbent lawmakers’ resistance to election reform to the N.R.A.’s opposition to gun-control laws.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/new-york-citys-needless-election-fiasco
New York City Votes
Our Local Correspondents
New York City’s Needless Election Fiasco
A bungled vote-counting procedure brought national attention to the city’s long history of poor election administration.
By Eric Lach
July 2, 2021
Even in a state that has long been considered, by those who keep track of such things, one of the worst in the country when it comes to election administration—the basic civic business of collecting and counting votes—New York City stands out. For decades, its Board of Elections, ten commissioners and hundreds of employees appointed by local political-party leaders, has been accused of mismanagement, corruption, nepotism, and outright incompetence. In 1971, the Times’ editorial page described the board as being “at best a semi‐functioning anachronism.” The description still applies. This week, the whole country found out why.
On Tuesday, the board released partial results of the Democratic Party’s mayoral primary. The numbers revealed a tight race between Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Kathryn Garcia, the longtime city bureaucrat. But something was off. On Election Night, the board had released even-more-partial results, which showed that eight hundred thousand New Yorkers had voted in person during the primary. This week, the numbers showed that some nine hundred and forty thousand had. Hours of confusion followed. Eventually, the board took down the results from its Web site and issued a statement resembling an explanation. A hundred and thirty five thousand “ballot images used for testing” had not been “cleared” from the computer program used to crunch the numbers, and had been accidentally included in the results when the “cast vote records were extracted,” the statement said. “The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.”
The error was fixable, and relatively small, but it stirred up many preëxisting anxieties and concerns about New York’s elections, and American elections in general. This year, New York City used ranked-choice voting for the first time, which meant that voters were able to choose up to five candidates for mayor, in order of preference. Advocates of ranked-choice voting say that the system encourages civil political debate, by incentivizing candidates to maintain broad appeal among the electorate. Officials had also built more time into its vote-counting process, to allow for absentee ballots to arrive by mail after Election Day, and to give voters the opportunity to “cure” small errors on ballots that, in the past, would have been tossed out. These changes had been implemented with the goal of enfranchising as many people as possible. But they also meant that some three weeks would elapse between Election Day and the announcing of the final results.
As with all reforms, there were people who had suspicions about the new changes, and others who were openly hostile to them. In the closing days of the mayoral primary race, Garcia had campaigned alongside Andrew Yang, the former Presidential candidate, in an attempt to convince his supporters to rank her second on their ballots. Adams, a Black ex-cop running on a public-safety message, who was both the front-runner in the race and its most polarizing figure, denounced the arrangement as a racist plot to deny him victory. His campaign put out statements warning that the Yang-Garcia alliance was an attempt to “steal the election from us,” language reminiscent of that used by Donald Trump and his supporters following the 2020 election. The Board of Elections’s screwup opened the door to more accusations and suspicions—thankfully, to everyone’s benefit, the candidates, including Adams, kept their cool. “It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time,” Adams said in a statement released on Tuesday night. “We appreciate the Board’s transparency and acknowledgment of their error. We look forward to the release of an accurate, updated simulation, and the timely conclusion of this critical process.”
On Wednesday morning, advocates of election reform held a conference call with reporters to emphasize that the board’s error wasn’t related to ranked-choice voting. “The discrepancy was due to human error, not any problem with the scanners, or the ranked-choice voting technology—this was a mistake by a low-level junior staffer,” Susan Lerner, the executive director of the New York chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group, said. “Let’s not sensationalize the event too far out of proportion.” (A Board of Elections spokesperson later confirmed to me that a junior staff member in Queens had forgotten to hit “clear” in the vote-counting software.) But the week’s events had been a reminder of past dysfunction at the Board of Elections. A 2020 Times investigation, for instance, noted that, at one point, nearly ten per cent of employees at the board were related, and that many others were the child, spouse, or parent of a local politician. During the 2020 Presidential primaries, which were held near the height of the pandemic last spring, the board tossed out some twenty per cent of absentee ballots; by comparison, Wisconsin election offices rejected less than two per cent of absentee primary ballots they received. On the conference call, Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate, expressed cautious optimism that the visibility of this week’s blunder would lead to action. “We’ve seen some pretty bad errors before,” he said. “Hopefully, you know, the national nature of this will finally spur some changes.”
Lerner, at Common Cause, told me that her group had urged the Board of Elections to release the results only after it had counted every ballot. The board chose instead to tabulate results piecemeal. On Election Night, it released the first-choice preferences of in-person voters, without including absentee ballots or accounting for ranked-choice voting preferences. This week, the board ran ranked-choice voting tabulations on the in-person ballots, but it still didn’t include the absentee ballots, of which there are about a hundred and twenty five thousand. In other words, all of this trouble had been over the equivalent of the third-quarter score of a basketball game. “It’s a totally needless mess,” Lerner said. “It’s just such a heartbreaking human error.” (A Board of Elections spokesperson told me that the decision to release partial results had been made “in the interest of transparency.”)
Lerner and other reformers have advocated for taking control of the board out of the hands of party officials, and professionalizing the system by hiring nonpartisan election administrators. But lawmakers in both Albany and New York City have largely ignored these calls. Stu Loeser, who served as Michael Bloomberg’s spokesperson when he attempted to push such reforms as mayor, compared incumbent lawmakers’ resistance to election reform to the N.R.A.’s opposition to gun-control laws. “When it comes to election reform, a lot of incumbent politicians are one-issue voters,” Loeser said. “It’s not an argument that can be won on logic or morals.”
On Wednesday night, the Board of Elections rereleased the partial results without the test ballots, and the picture looked much the same as it had the night before. It was a close race among Adams, Garcia, and Maya Wiley, with more than a hundred thousand ballots still to count. Those interested in actually learning the outcome of the election would have to wait a few more weeks. “It’s a massive undertaking, to run an election in a large jurisdiction,” Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one the country’s foremost experts on election law, told me. Ballots need to be checked for eligibility. Absentee ballots need to be processed. Provisional ballots, too. “These are all safeguards that protect our system from fraud and mistakes,” Hasen said. “But the trade-off is that it takes time to process them. People need to be patient.”