The New York City Election Commission has a history of accidents and is now under fire for its errors in publishing the results of the mayoral primary election.
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Authors: Brian M. Rosenthal, Dana Rubinstein, Andy Newman, Anne Barnard, and Ed Shanahan
As New Yorkers began voting for rankings in the first citywide elections, chaos quietly disrupted the government agencies that oversee the elections.
Just a few weeks before the early voting, the New York City Election Commission lost its executive director and one of his senior deputies. It was forced to change its plan to announce the results.
As elementary school day approaches on June 22, the remaining leaders of the board of directors have repeatedly refused to provide the help of ranking selection software and postponed the training of employees, which caused confusion among employees.
On Tuesday, as the city eagerly awaited the results of the mayor’s primary election and other major elections, when the agency released its preliminary rankings to select the total number of votes, the problem suddenly appeared in the public eye—but they withdrew them a few hours later. Acknowledge that they are no longer trustworthy.
The official explained that the committee mistakenly included more than 130,000 test ballots in the preliminary statistics. A new ranking selection statistic was carried out on Wednesday, and the top-line results remained unchanged: Eric Adams, who received the most votes on the night of the primary election, is still the first choice, but the number gap with him is small. many. The closest opponent, Catherine Garcia.
However, the result seemed almost anticlimactic, and the memory of Tuesday’s chaos still aroused anger throughout the city, and again called on the Election Commission to change. Although decades of mistakes and scandals have been hindering the reform of the institution, it has once again triggered a long-standing sense of frustration.
"This is just a fiasco year after year," said Lulu Friesdat, executive director of Smart Elections, an electoral reform organization. "The fact that we haven't worked hard to change this is shocking. It's shocking."
New York is the only state in the United States that has a local election committee, and its staff are almost entirely elected by Democratic and Republican bosses. The system is designed to ensure fairness by empowering parties to monitor each other, but New York City’s board of directors has been criticized for nepotism, incompetence, and corruption for decades.
In recent years, the political appointees of the management board have repeatedly stumbled. Before the 2016 election, they mistakenly removed about 200,000 people from the voter list; they forced some voters to wait in long lines for four hours on Election Day 2018; last year, they sent messages to nearly 100,000 New Yorkers who tried to vote by mail Wrong ballot.
Nevertheless, although some legislators have put forward reform proposals, these proposals have not received much attention. The structure of the Election Commission is enshrined in the New York State Constitution, so it is difficult to change. Political leaders have little incentive to support any reforms because the current system gives them a lot of power.
On Wednesday, in the face of anger and ridicule from the entire political arena-including a statement issued by former President Donald J. Trump-the leaders of the New York State Senate and Congress vowed to hold hearings to finally resolve the board's issues .
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat who leads the Senate, said in a statement: “The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with in a timely manner.” “In the next few years. Within this week, the Senate will hold a hearing on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as soon as possible."
Despite the legislators' promises of reforms, the board of directors admitted for the first time on Wednesday that it was operating throughout the election season without much leadership team.
A spokesperson confirmed that Michael Ryan, who has been an executive director of the board of directors since 2013, has been on sick leave since the beginning of March. Day to retire.
The New York Post reported on Mr. Ryan’s sick leave earlier on Wednesday.
Wilma Brown Phillips, who was selected to replace Ms. Perkins, started work on Monday, which means that the board of directors has no administrative manager on elementary school day.
In the absence of the two Democrats, Mr. Ryan and Ms. Perkins, the daily operations are actually in charge of the two top Republicans on the board, Dawn Sandow and Georgea Kontzamanis.
Ms. Sandow is a former executive director of the Bronx Republican Party and has a deep connection with Guy Velella. Guy Velella is a long-time legislator and leader of the Bronx Party who resigned from an elected position in 2004 after admitting to a bribery conspiracy.
Several employees said that the leadership vacuum — a new way of voting in a fierce election — caused a commotion on the board for months.
When the board of directors dealt with these issues, it also ignored the technical assistance provided by the software vendor, which will use the software to list the votes for the ranking selection.
Its policy director, Christopher W. Hughes, said that the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center first offered to help on May 26, and then tried many times.
Hughes said in an interview on Wednesday: "We have proposed to the Election Committee to attend in person or remotely and support the ranking election."
Mr. Hughes said the resource center can run a parallel process, using the same data and copies of the same software, to ensure that the results match. He said doing so would make them more likely to catch test votes that were inadvertently added to the count on Tuesday.
The Election Commission spokesperson Valerie Vazquez-Diaz (Valerie Vazquez-Diaz) declined to answer the substance of Mr. Hughes' assertion.
Instead, she reiterated the board’s position that the problem was not caused by the software, but by the staff of the agency.
"The problem is not the software," Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said. "There was human error and the staff did not delete the test ballot images from the election management system."
After understanding the potential role of human error, Mr. Hughes proposed to provide software training for New York City election staff and provide “remote or on-site support” when voting tables were needed.
His original proposal established a budget of US$90,000 for aid until 2025 at a cost of US$100 or US$150 per hour. But he received no response, even after trying again on June 2nd, June 14th, and finally on June 21st, the day before the primary election.
The organization’s software was used in primaries in Kansas, Wyoming, and Alaska last year. Mr. Hughes said the center always provides some assistance to jurisdictions that use its software.
"However, other jurisdictions tend to be more sensitive to outreach responses," he said.
Since the deadlock with the State Election Commission took more than a year to resolve, the commission started relatively late in testing software to generate ranking selection results. Just a month before the election, the board still faces the possibility of having to manually count hundreds of thousands of votes.
It wasn't until May 25 that the state assembly approved the city council's preferred software package, the universal ranking selection voting form.
State Election Commission co-chair Douglas Kellner (Douglas Kellner) said that the delay was caused by the city’s election commission itself and the resistance of Republicans on the state commission.
"The Municipal Election Commission has other priorities, and this is a problem," Mr. Kellner said. "When they finally started to say,'We will conduct a ranking election next year', Republicans on the State Election Commission began to delay because they questioned whether the city has the authority to amend the bylaws to provide this voting system. Therefore, this increased. Months of additional delay."
Workers said the delays also plagued plans to train employees to use the software and to vote for rankings. Two employees stated that they did not receive training until the early voting began.
When the board leaders struggled to decide how and when to publish the results of the ranking selection vote, the last challenge emerged.
The board of directors has always planned to announce the first vote results of early voters and on-site voters only on the night of the primary election. Initially, it planned to wait until all absentee ballots were received before proceeding to an immediate run-off that was enabled by the ranking selection section of the election.
However, officials have received pressure to announce the results in advance, including Congressman Brad Lander, who filed a legislative request for early reporting in December. Some supporters of ranking selection voting have long requested the disclosure of raw voting data, partly because they fear that if absent voting changes the results, critics will accuse the ranking selection voting.
At the last moment—just a few days before the elementary school holiday, the employees said—the board reached a compromise: it will only release the results of the immediate run-off for those who voted early and in person, as a counter-system. It was released on Tuesday, and the calculation was wrong and caused anger.
As early as December, at a supervisory hearing of the city council, there was a debate about when to release the results.
At that hearing, Senator Fernando Cabrera (Fernando Cabrera) opened with a warning that now sounds very prescient.
He said: "2021 is the largest year of local events in recent memory. All city offices and two-thirds of the city council seats will hold open competitions." "We can't make this mistake."