City BOE to Vote on Election Night Changes

The city Board of Elections meets Tuesday to consider whether to change how it reports unofficial election night returns. The board was heavily criticized for failing to report results from all polling precincts on primary night last month in what turned out to be a close race between Congressman Charles Rangel and state Senator Adriano Espaillat.

The change would only affect how the election night tally is reported to the media, but good government advocates say it’s a change that sets the foundation for more reform at the Board of Elections.

“When we’re talking about an unofficial count, a sense of the election result on election night, this is what the machines do best,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause. “It’s not what pen and paper does best.”

The new process would allow the city to pull unofficial results directly from the memory sticks in the new optical scanner voting machines. A bipartisan team of poll workers would join police officers back at the police precincts where those memory sticks would be connected to a computer and the votes would be uploaded and automatically tallied.

Currently, poll workers must take receipts from each of the voting machines. Cut those papers by election district, add the results for each candidate in each election district and then manually write the totals on three tally sheets. Those sheets are given to members of the New York City Police Department, who are stationed at every polling site from the time the site opens until it closes.

This manual process will continue, even if a majority of the city’s Board of Elections commissioners vote to approve the new process. But the new closing procedure should prevent the errors that occurred in the June primary, where the totals floated from election night until the vote was certified two weeks later.

“The city Board has not only the authority, but the obligation to modernize it’s reporting of unofficial election night results,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, who said that a small minority voice within the board has argued against changing the city’s election night reporting process.

That voice is the Board’s general counsel Steve Richman,who questioned whether the board could change its interpretation of current state election law, and therefore its election night procedures.

“I think we would have difficulty defending out actions in a court of law,” Richman told the Board last week. “You may win the court of public opinion.”

Dadey said Citizens Union disagrees with that opinion and believes state law can be interpreted to show that the city Board can change its procedures as a matter of public policy. The group plans to submit a legal justification explaining its position to the Board at Tuesday’s meeting.

Last Friday, the executive directors of the State Board of Elections also sent a letter to the city board endorsing the changes.

Bronx Elections Commissioner Juan Carlos Polanco, a Republican who initially proposed changing the election night procedures at last week’s meeting, said Richman, the Board’s counsel, has consistently provided the board with conservative legal interpretations of state election law.

Polanco said he’s asking the other commissioners to consider a more liberal interpretation of state election law so that the memory sticks can be used at the precincts for unofficial election results. “Let’s see if we can implement another section of election law which would allow for us to provide the NYPD with the information from the memory stick.”

He said he is optimistic that six out of ten commissioners will vote in favor of the change so that it can be implemented in time for the September 13 state legislative primary.