Fundamental flaws at the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) were identified in a comprehensive report from December 2013 by the City’s Department of Investigation (DOI), which recommended more than 40 reforms. At an oversight hearing of the City Council’s Governmental Operations Committee in February 2014, new DOI Commissioner Mark Peters testified that his office found issues of gross nepotism, pressure on staff to engage in political activities, deficient voter rolls, poorly trained poll workers, and inadequate, inefficient, and outdated procedures. “The illegalities, misconduct, and antiquated operations detailed in the report are deeply corrosive and must end,” Peters said at the hearing. He called on the BOE to provide a Corrective Action Plan to implement those reforms.
A DOI spokesperson said that the BOE had implemented a small percentage of those reforms but did not provide an Official Corrective Action Plan, did not implement key reforms, or keep DOI updated on whether additional reforms have been put in place. BOE officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Many have praised BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan, who took over in 2013, while continuing to point to problems in both BOE function and the State Laws that govern the BOE.
City Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-5th District) said that many BOE issues had indeed been resolved over the past two years, but “I was disappointed that despite moving forward on a lot of improvements, the BOE still has a lot of problems.”
The February 2014 hearing was Kallos’ first as Chair of the Governmental Operations Committee and he has since worked hard to impress upon the BOE the need for reform. In an interview, he was clear that to him the two main issues at the BOE are the political patronage in appointments and the lack of an efficient voter information portal.
In the months leading up to Tuesday’s Primary, tiny cracks were beginning to appear in the BOE’s handling of this year’s elections. It misprinted absentee ballots and sent vague and confusing election notices to voters. Then, just as people were heading to vote on April 19, WNYC radio discovered that more than 60,000 Brooklyn Democrats had been removed from the electoral rolls in what turned out to be a major clerical error that has already led to one employee suspension and helped prompt the launch of multiple investigations by Government regulators. The number actually turned out to be 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats removed from the rolls.
Kallos, who has long advocated for BOE reform, first brought up the online voter information portal in 2007, when more than a million voters were removed from the rolls ahead of the 2008 Presidential elections. Kallos did his own analysis of the voter purge in Brooklyn, crunching the numbers from the State voter file and looking at how Kings County routinely purges thousands of people from the rolls every year. It is normal practice for the BOE’s different Borough Offices to remove inactive voters from the rolls based on people who have died, not voter in four years, or moved away. But, the extent of the purge is the question.
Kallos intends to find out more once he gets BOE officials in front of him. “It’s a concern that eight years after I raised this, it continues to be a problem,” he said. “The issue is state law. If someone doesn’t vote and fails to respond to one letter (from the BOE), they get removed from the rolls. We really need Albany to do its job here.”
A major concern for Kallos is the political structure of the BOE. The Board is composed of ten Commissioners, two each from New York’s five boroughs. The candidates are recommended by the political parties, typically the County Chair of each Party, and confirmed by the City Council to serve four-year terms. Staff is also hired on a partisan basis. Kallos believes the City should stop funding these “patronage positions” and hire qualified people through publicly advertised jobs. “The staff people who lack the competence to fix these problems need to be replaced with staff that can do the job,” he said, discussing the issue of the full-time BOE staff, which only begins to touch on the issue of the Election Day Provisional staff who administer voting throughout the City and often commit mistakes.
Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause New York, a good government group, shares Kallos’ views. “We pick people based on their party affiliation and who they know, and that means sometimes we get very capable people and sometimes we don’t, and that’s not a good way to choose people,” Lerner said.
Lerner compared New York’s flawed system with Los Angeles, which has a Nonpartisan Professional Election Administration that, she said, is responsive to voters and taxpayers. “Our Board of Elections is not responsive to either and that is a matter of state law,” she added. “The lines of accountability are completely unclear.” She did say that the BOE had improved to a degree under recent management.
Another government reform group, the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), also bemoaned the administration of Tuesday’s election. In a press statement, NYPIRG called on Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Legislature to establish automatic voter registration and updating of enrollment data, and same-day registration on election day, and echoed calls for eliminating patronage in selection of BOE employees. The group also said the State should shrink its registration and change of enrollment deadlines to ten days prior to the election. For this year’s Primary, the deadline for people to change their party affiliation was October 9, 2015, the earliest deadline of any State in the country.
Some members of the State Legislature acknowledged these issues and the dire need for reform. Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat, and State Senator Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat, have sponsored the Voter Empowerment Act, which provides for automatic registration of eligible voters and online registration, and changes the deadlines for registration and party enrollment. “The system now generates a lot of obstacles to voting,” Kavanagh said. “And it’s important that we not get too focused on any one of them, and instead think about it as a broad, systematic set of problems with a series of solutions, all of which we should consider and many of which we should implement.”
Among the issues Kavanagh raised are BOE staffing and poll worker training, long shifts for poll workers on election days, and simply “bad, outdated” election laws.
Part of the problem is the BOE’s failure to communicate with the public, said Matt Sollars, Press Secretary for the New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB). “It’s troubling that the BOE provided little notice to the public about its efforts to clean the voter rolls, or guidance on how to resolve the issue for voters who had been removed,” Sollars said. “Particularly in the run-up to a high-profile election, the BOE should do more to clearly communicate to voters about what it is doing and what actions they need to take, if any.”
Many of the problems, Sollars said, would be resolved by updating the state’s “archaic” voting laws. The CFB, with its voter engagement arm, NYC Votes, and a broad coalition is putting forward a “Vote Better NY” platform, which includes several changes to voting rules.
On Wednesday, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito seemed to echo all these frustrations. “Obviously my interest, as everybody’s interest here, is to make sure that our Board of Elections conducts an election process that is thorough, fair, and as smooth as possible,” she said, responding to reporters at a news conference at City Hall. “Unfortunately, the reality is that every election we have problems and issues -- polls open late, etc., and those are things that we can’t tolerate.” “The concerns that were raised are ones that we’ve heard in other elections as well,” she added. “And we’ve gotta make sure that this just stops at some point.”
Last week's was the first of four election days this year in New York City, with Congressional Primaries coming up in June, State-level Primaries in September, and Election Day in November.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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