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NYC's Board of Elections planned to get it right. Low turnout helped.
By
Brigid Bergin
Published Jun 28, 2023
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Brittany Kriegstein/Gothamist
By
Brigid Bergin
Published Jun 28, 2023
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The New York City Board of Elections faces scrutiny around every election — at least, it seems that way in recent years.
There was the flawed tally of ranked-choice votes in 2021; misprinted absentee ballot envelopes and long lines during early voting in 2020; voting machines that choked on wet ballots in 2018; a voter purge ahead of the 2016 presidential primary that inadvertently removed thousands of people from the rolls; and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which upended poll sites and led to a change in affidavit ballot rules the day before the election.
On Tuesday, as the city deployed more than 20,000 poll workers to some 1,000 poll sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, for two dozen City Council primaries, two boroughwide district attorney primaries and dozens of other judicial and party positions on the ballot, the day was far less dramatic.
Turnout was low as anticipated, with turnout in competitive races like in the 9th Council District in Harlem only reaching 11% and clocking in at the single digits in other cases. But with fewer voters came fewer problems.
As one of the city’s top elections officials stressed, the agency also took careful and meticulous steps to get it right — knowing full well the criticism it faced in the past.
“We have humans, so we have human error like every other agency in the city of New York,” said Vincent Ignizio, the deputy executive director of the New York City Board of Elections and the agency’s main spokesperson. “Our goal is to just run free and fair elections and basically get out of the way, let the voters do what it is they need to do and be as error-free as possible.”
Ignizio, who took the post of deputy executive director in December 2021, said the agency made changes to personnel and procedures to prevent the kind of erroneous ranked-choice tally the city board briefly published in the June 2021 mayoral primary, the first citywide test of the new voting system. The error occurred the week after the election, when several high-profile contests, including the Democratic mayoral primary, hung in the balance.
“What we had there was a human error caused by someone who worked in one of the boroughs,” Ignizio said. He also noted that the board identified and communicated about the error. The agency sent a tweet within the hour of publishing the incorrect information explaining the discrepancy was the product of 135,000 test ballots. The erroneous results were removed from the agency’s website and the subsequent ranked-choice tallies were posted without issue.
He said the agency conducted rigorous testing of the ranked-choice system ahead of this election. The changes have been enough to elicit the support from a good government advocate who does not shy away from calling out — or suing — the agency when she objects to their conduct.
“I have an open and productive relationship with the BOE regarding ranked-choice voting, and other reforms,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, which sued the agency in 2016 for illegally purging voters from its rolls.
Since 2019, New York has instituted a series of reforms to how elections are conducted, including the addition of nine days of early voting, changes to absentee ballot rules, the adoption of ranked-choice voting, launching a new online voter registration system and additional work to make ballots more accessible to voters with disabilities.
Lerner said asking the agency to institute all those reforms, while also running dozens of elections during a global pandemic was like “asking the battleship to turn on a dime,” adding that some errors were expected.
“Nobody was disenfranchised,” said Lerner. “The counts were all under control and accurate.”
Tagged
new york city
manhattan
Politics
Brigid Bergin
Brigid Bergin is an award-winning senior reporter on the People and Power desk. She is fiercely committed to telling stories that help people engage and support democracy. In 2022, she hosted a live, ten-week call-in politics show ahead of the midterm elections called The People's Guide to Power. Brigid's reporting in 2017 included some of the first coverage of a political newcomer now known as AOC. In 2016, she broke the news of a voter purge in Brooklyn just days before New York’s presidential primary, triggering city, state and federal investigations. Brigid also guest hosts The Brian Lehrer Show and All Of It. She graduated from the University at Albany and the CUNY Newmark School of Journalism. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-723-4719.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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