The performance of the New York City Board of Elections has been subject to a high level of scrutiny this week. Late Thursday, it suspended the top official at the Brooklyn Borough office, Chief Clerk Diane Haslett-Rudiano, without pay pending an investigation. It’s expected to look at whether she skipped a step in the list maintenance process that led to the voter purge.

The move comes after WNYC revealed that 126,000 voters had been purged from the rolls in Brooklyn before Tuesday's primary. While this is far from the first time the board has faced post-election blowback, the agency has done little to change its ways.

The criticism and calls for change are not new. The Board was a favorite target of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg who in 2008 said, “the public is as badly served by this agency as any city thing or state thing I've ever seen.”

In 2010, when the Board failed to mail thousands of overseas military ballots by the deadline, Bloomberg lashed out again. He said there was only one way to fix the agency. “You open up the Board of Elections to the best and the brightest who will go to work there and not have just prizes for being in the Democratic or Republican parties,” he said.

Now, as it has been for decades, the positions at the Board of Elections are political.

The Commissioners are selected by the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties in each of the five boroughs and the staff is made up of party members — all while taxpayers foot the bill and the city allocates the budget. 

That means even as Bloomberg's frustration is echoed by Mayor Bill de Blasio — who called out the board for its performance on Tuesday's primary election — there's little he can do to force change.

It’s unclear under state election law whether the city could even attach conditions to the funding it provides the agency, according to Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause New York.

“The Board of Elections maintains it's not a city agency and that it's not subject to city oversight,” Lerner said. "But it's the city taxpayers who are paying the freight and it's the city voters who are depending on the Board of Elections to do their job at the highest level of competence."

In 2013, the city's Department of Investigation released a scathing 72-page report detailing problems that occurred during that year's primary and general elections. The report cited issues of nepotism, extensive problems with poll worker training and details about how the board is supposed to cancel voters from the rolls.

At the time, the board's executive director Michael Ryan was only a few months into the job and said there was, “nothing in the report that comes as a shock.”

He also wanted to make clear to voters, “That we are not sitting on our hands. That we are taking a very proactive approach to all of these issues that are raised in the DOI report and we have been working on them prior to the issuance of the report.”

This week was not a banner week for demonstrating progress on those reforms.

After WNYC's reports and after receiving 1,400 complaints from voters, the State Attorney General's office launched an investigation into the city board.

In a statement, the Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said, "the administration of the voter rolls in Brooklyn is of major concern to our office and is a focus of our investigation.” 

Ryan declined to comment citing the AG's ongoing investigation.

A worthwhile note from that DOI report from 2013 — the process to delete a voter from the roles requires approval from two staff members.

So far, only one person has been suspended.