As if this year’s voting-machine mess wasn’t bad enough, the Board of Elections still hasn’t provided the city with answers on how it plans to reform following a blistering audit of its failures in the 2016 primary, city Comptroller Scott Stringer charges.
It took the board — which was panned for its performance in last week’s midterms — 11 weeks to even admit it couldn’t provide the answers, Stringer said in a letter to the board.
According to Stringer, the board said it couldn’t give the comptroller answers until after the 2018 election was certified.
The response was “not just tardy but vague in the extreme,” he wrote. “BOE must assure voters as soon as possible that steps are being taken to address the incompetence we all witnessed last week — incompetence that effectively disenfranchises untold numbers of New York City voters during every election.”
Stringer’s office launched its probe after election officials in Brooklyn wrongly purged voter rolls in the runup to the 2016 presidential primary. Other failures have been followed by blistering reviews.
State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office issued a report that outlined major training problems at the board in October 2010 after long lines, scanner problems and poor training fouled up that year’s primary.