What is the the Board of Elections and why should we care?

The New York City Board of Elections is the body that operates poll sites, counts votes and certifies results on Election Day. Most of the time, it’s a modest operation of 351 full-time staff members, most of them working in the executive office two blocks from Battery Park in downtown Manhattan. But around Election Day it grows manifold, adding about 30,000 temporary poll workers to its team. It’s an administrative body, but one that’s inherently political, with leadership appointed by Republicans and Democrats in each of the city’s five boroughs. It is responsible, among other things, for drawing district lines — in other words, deciding where voters can vote.

Board of Elections workers count paper ballots in a close race for Congress between Rep. Charles Rangel and State Sen. Adriano Espaillat. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Why am I pulling a lever instead of sticking a form into a scanning machine?

For all their technological wonder, the $95 million scanner voting machines that the board purchased in 2010 can’t reboot overnight. Resetting the optical machines would involve retrieving them from about 1,200 polling sites, reprogramming them, testing them and shipping them back to their designated polling centers. The board has said that that just can’t be done with certainty in the three-week window between Tuesday’s primary elections and a potential October 1 runoff. (A runoff is held for citywide offices if no candidate earns more than 40 percent of the vote.) The decision to use the old machines comes with Albany’s stamp of approval: The state Legislature passed a law allowing the city to redeploy the lever machines, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed off. Mayor Michael Bloomberg criticized the move.
 

So, where does my vote go after I cast my ballot?

In most cases, it doesn’t leave the machine. Lever machines don’t provide a paper trail because there is no ballot to store. Once a voter pulls the lever, the vote is recorded in the back of the machine by a tracker that keeps count by incrementing meters, said election lawyer Tom Garry. “It’s like the arrow that registers miles on your car,” Garry said. When the polls close, the votes inside the machine are tallied and written down manually on a canvas sheet, which is given to the Board of Elections. Devotees of voting with metal-lever machines say that the devices are efficient and that there’s nothing better than the clunky sound and feel of submitting your vote by pulling a lever. But good-government groups and election reform advocates worry that if the machine breaks and loses the vote count, there is no paper trail to go back to. For those voters who decided to cast their vote through absentee ballot, the forms are stored in Board of Elections facilities across the five boroughs.

I’ve heard about ballot tampering. How real is it? Has it ever happened in New York City?

The state’s election laws are dense with rules designed to help prevent vote fraud and ballot tampering, and yet it does happen. The Board of Elections went several years without a leader after executive director George Gonzalez was fired in 2010, amid allegations of ballot manipulation in a Queens special election. In a 2012 district leader race in Brooklyn, one candidate’s campaign accused another candidate of tampering with votes inside poll sites. New York City has a long and colorful history of election fraud and ballot manipulation, a practice commonly associated with the Tammany Hall political machine.

And I’ve heard about the board losing votes in the past. Should I trust that my vote is going to count?

Well, trust is a personal choice, but here are the facts. Ballots are counted manually in New York City elections, and that has led over the years to an impressive tally of blunders involving miscounts and lost ballots. In August 2013, Democratic state Senator Liz Krueger vented on Twitter after receiving a letter, for the second time, in which the board informed her uncounted ballots had just been found from her election in 2012.

So (for a 2nd time!) the NYC BoE informs me they've found uncounted ballots from my 2012 reelect. #CantMakeThisUp pic.twitter.com/0YyippgN6b

— Senator Liz Krueger (@LizKrueger) August 20, 2013

And in July, the Board declared it had found nearly 1,600 ballots that should have been counted in the November 2012 election. In most cases, the vanishing votes wouldn’t have changed the course of the elections. But there have been bitter counterexamples: Last year, Democratic State Senator Adriano Espaillat gave a concession speech after being told that he had lost his run for a U.S. Congress seat to his rival Charles Rangel, only later to be told that additional results showed the race was actually too close to call. Espaillat reentered the race but would later again concede.

Lastly, voters’ ballots only count when they’re cast in the right election district, so if you go to the wrong polling site and insist on voting there, it’s likely your ballot will be nullified. If you’re voting on one of the optical scanner machines and you mistakenly fill in multiple choices for the same office, which is called an “overvote,” then you have a chance to correct your ballot. But some voters opt out of correcting it. Those votes will also be nullified.

I’ve heard absentee ballots are not counted unless the race is close. Is that true?

There is a persistent myth that absentee ballots are not always counted, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, said election lawyer Sean Hinds. “Absentee ballots are always counted,” he said. However, if the number of outstanding ballots is smaller than the difference between two candidates, a preliminary winner may be called before every last vote has been tallied. The issue, therefore, “is whether or not they’ll be critical to the outcome of the race,” Hinds said.

What happens if the race is too close to call?

Then a recount is called, referred to as “recanvassing” in New York’s state election law. Electoral rules require a hand inspection of voting machines in any election where the margin is 0.5% or less of the total vote and determines the candidate’s nomination, noted election lawyer Mitchell Alter. “When the number of votes are counted, you see the difference between the two candidates, if that total is less than one half of 1 percent of total votes, then guess what, you’ll have a manual recount,” Alter said. “But that number doesn’t get there too often,” he said. “Once in a blue moon.”

Does the Board ultimately decide who gets to be mayor if the election is a close call?

The Board certifies the results of a vote, and that usually decides the outcome of an election. But in a tight race, candidates often turn to the courts as an additional arbiter. “If there are any errors that the Board of Elections may make in the recanvassing of the ballots, it would be addressed in the [state] Supreme Court,” election lawyer Sean Hinds said.

Whoo, lawsuits, that sounds time consuming. What if a mayoral candidate goes to court and the issue isn’t resolved before the runoff date on October 1?

That’s a good question. Parties and authorities are unlikely to let this happen, Hinds contends. “There are other pressures that you have to take into consideration, in terms of the amount of money that has to be put aside for a race,” said Hinds. “All due diligence would be put upon the judges and the Board of Elections to make sure that any issue is addressed in a timely fashion.”

We’ve asked the Board of Elections for its scenario for a bitterly fought ballot count of Bush v. Gore proportions emerging from the Sept. 10 primary contests. Fingers crossed, we won’t need to know the details.