NYC elections board slammed by voters, advocates, poll workers at hearing
ALBANY, N.Y. — The New York City Board of Elections was raked over the coals Wednesday as lawmakers heard from frustrated poll workers, voters and advocates at an hourslong hearing focused on election reforms.
Attendees at the hearing, held at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, described woefully understaffed polling sites and issues with absentee ballots that surfaced during June’s problem-plagued primary.
Jan Combopiano of the Brooklyn Voters Alliance set the tone for the hearing as she described the difficulty of coordinating a woefully understaffed polling location where only nine of 26 workers showed up on Election Day.
“We had lines all day long,” she said. “Because we only had enough people for each roll, nobody could take a break. I begged the Board of Elections for more poll workers.
“Democracy takes work and the workers who practice democracy need help,” she added.
Judith Hertzberg decried what she described as the patronage system that allows political parties to appoint loyalists to election positions and argued for postage-paid envelopes for absentee ballots.
“I have seen this in many aspects of the voting process,” she said. “The voter experience must be improved.”
The Senate hearing was the first of several to be held across the state in the coming weeks. Sen. Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn, the chamber’s Elections Committee chairman, said he hopes to hear directly from voters and poll workers as lawmakers weigh sweeping reforms.
“I’m excited to begin the process of delivering a world-class democracy to every single voter in the state of New York,” he said.
Since taking over the majority, Democrats in the Legislature have already passed several election-related reforms, introducing early voting and electronic poll books and expanding mail-in ballots.
Lawmakers are now eyeing legislation sponsored by Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan, that would modernize the leadership of the city’s election board, set training requirements and qualifications for employees and boost reporting and accountability measures.
The hearings come on the heels of a string of high-profile Board of Elections blunders that have advocates calling for changes to how election systems are run in the city and across the state.
The city Board of Elections has faced criticism in recent weeks for releasing preliminary vote totals in the mayoral primary that included 135,000 test ballots, a mar on the city’s first attempt at ranked-choice voting.
Last year, ahead of the general election in November, the board erroneously mailed thousands of absentee ballots to the wrong voters.
The board pushed back on the criticism and expressed a desire to share its side of the story in a tweet that provided the wrong date for a planned hearing in Albany.
“We look forward to testifying in person at the Senate Committee on Elections in Albany on September 28, 2021,” the board tweeted. “That will allow the Board to clarify misinformation, incomplete information and provide factual information regarding the NYC Board of Elections.”
The Albany hearing is scheduled for Sept. 21.
———
