In 537 Manhattan election districts, workers failed to properly record some or all vote totals after polls closed, an internal review has found. That means 60% of the 887 Manhattan districts that had competitive races that day had at least one error in their returns. Manhattan, in fact, produced twice as many “discrepancies” as the four other boroughs combined.
The majority of the Manhattan errors occurred in the controversial 13th Congressional District race, a board spokesman confirmed. That’s where Rep. Charles Rangel defeated State Sen. Adriano Espaillat by less than 1,000 votes after a recount that lasted two weeks.
In late August, the Manhattan board sent stern letters to 152 Election Day inspectors. It warned them that they had violated board procedures during the June primary, and it ordered them to take an immediate retraining class or they would not be permitted to work in today’s primary election. Two-thirds of those letters went to poll workers in Espaillat’s 72nd Assembly District in Inwood and Washington Heights, board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez said. On Election Day, only a handful of the 24 poll workers assigned there were Hispanic. No or few Spanish interpreter was placed at the polls. Virtually all of the poll workers, in fact, were appointed by the board, not by the pro-Espaillat district leaders which usually pick the workers for their districts.
The Board of Elections is now promising that its new procedure of taking tallies directly from voting machine computer data sticks will eliminate past human errors.
We hear about all the Voter ID laws, but how do you protect the voters from disfunctional Board of Elections?
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!
Michael H. Drucker
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