“You Had One Job!”

October 28, 2020

A Gazette Editorial

Every two weeks paychecks are electronically deposited into the bank accounts of more than 300,000 municipal employees. Despite a wide variety of job titles, hours worked, leaves taken, deductions, bank routing numbers, new hires, etc, etc, for the most part it goes down smoothly. The reason is that the City’s been doing payroll since forever and has fixed many glitches and even kept up, to a degree, with technical advances.

So the craptastic job the Board of Elections does is even more inexcusable when you consider the relative simplicity and infrequency of their job in comparison. Aside from primaries and rare specials, elections here occur on a regular two year schedule that’s almost always known many years in advance. The number of potential voters is also known well in advance because voters must register ahead of time and BoE has that information. And the job itself is pretty straightforward – after check in, the voters themselves complete and return their ballot.

The Gazette covered the first day of early voting on Saturday and found the people waiting on long lines to be surprisingly patient – especially by NYC standards. Anyone who’s ever been growled at for simply being in somebody’s way and possibly causing them a few seconds of delay would be amazed to learn that any of our first early voters were pretty dang calm about waiting three and a half hours to vote on Saturday.

But as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez correctly pointed out, there is no place in America where long lines of three hours to vote are acceptable and that, just because it’s a ‘blue state’ doesn’t mean it’s not voter suppression. Not everybody has three hours to spare. They have a job to go to, kids to pick up from school, or need to sleep because they work at night. So they can’t vote. The thing that makes the Board of Elections inept performance so infuriating is that it’s not even by design as in some states. They evidently just can’t do any better. A recent item in the Times revealed a culture of nepotism and goof offs at the agency. Someone who was contracted to train staff for them told us some war stories several years ago that we could hardly believe. He flatly asserted that they hire only the absolute worst people. The agency was nearly evicted once, he said, after employees pissed in the same elevator that residents of million dollar condos in the same luxury midtown building used.

Whatever the reasons, the Board of Elections has done a lousy job managing early voting. We won’t even know about the usual problems with missing registrations and provisional ballots, machine breakdowns, and long waits for definitive results until later, but even now we can assign the Board a failing grade for their shoddy work thus far. Clearly, more locations and staff would have meant shorter lines and less waiting. Who was responsible for this? Why haven’t they been fired? Maybe their actions don’t rise to criminal interference, but that should be looked into as well.

As faith in American institutions declines precipitously, and often intentionally at the hands of those who stand to benefit from social collapse, the Board of Elections‘ incompetence is inexcusable and unacceptable. Heads must roll and the agency must be entirely rebuilt from the ground up, with competent and professional leadership so that nothing like this Hell Week of early voting ever again happens in NYC.