Poll Sites Crippled By Problems During 2016 Election, Audit Finds

NEW YORK, NY — The illegal purge of thousands of Brooklynites from the voter rolls was just the tip of an iceberg of problems at the city Board of Elections, an audit released Friday says. The BOE may have disenfranchised voters in 2016 by understaffing poll sites with workers who were in many cases poorly trained, the audit by city Comptroller Scott Stringer's office found.

Auditors found problems at 90 percent of the poll sites they visited in 2016, from a poll worker texting instead of helping voters to others telling someone which candidate's name to write on an affidavit ballot. Staffers broke federal, state or BOE rules at more than half the sites, the audit says. Three quarters were understaffed and nearly 29 percent weren't accessible to people with disabilities.

The BOE should ensure every poll site is accessible and staffed with poll workers and interpreters, the audit says. It calls for the board to re-evaluate how it trains workers to handle affidavit ballots, ballot scanners and overall Election Day protocol.

"After a thorough review of the agency, it’s clear the voter purge is a reflection of larger, systemic, day-to-day breakdowns," Stringer, a Democrat seeking re-election next week, said in a statement Friday. "Elections matter, and every vote must be counted in every election. That’s why the BOE needs to fundamentally change its operations."

The BOE admitted to the federal Department of Justice last month that its 2015 removal of more than 117,000 voters from its Brooklyn rolls broke federal law. Those names were put back on the rolls before the 2016 general election, but many were prevented from voting in April's presidential primary.

Stringer's auditors surveyed 156 poll sites last year during the June congressional primaries, September local primaries and November general election. The results came out just four days before next week's Nov. 7 citywide election.

The board rejected most of Stringer's recommendations, saying some were based on "anecdotal" evidence or flew in the face of good election practices. Auditors never reported problems they saw directly to the BOE as they were happening, according to the board's written response to the audit.

"Such an alert would have provided the Board an opportunity to remediate any problem on election day and may have prevented such circumstances from future occurrence," the BOE's executive director, John J. Ryan, wrote in the response.

Poll worker mistakes disenfranchised some voters last year, the audit says. In one case, a distracted poll worker voided a ballot that wasn't properly filled out after the voter had left the polling place.

Auditors saw poll workers who ignored voters or were too busy to help them at 10 percent of the visited sites, the report says. Workers at 14 percent of those polling places didn't correctly handle affidavit ballots, which voters fill out if they're not listed on the rolls.

About 17 percent of the poll worker posts weren't even filled over the three elections, the audit found. Fourteen sites had too few or no interpreters for voters who didn't speak English, and 12 percent lacked "accessibility clerks" who help voters with disabilities.

The BOE's lackluster poll worker training fueled these problems, the audit says. There's little hands-on training, and the open-book test trainees take tells them where to find the answers. One worker told auditors it's an "idiot test."

In its response, the BOE said its dearth of poll workers reflects "a national downward trend." The board has put forth "extensive" recruitment efforts and spends $600,000 annually just on subway ads for the jobs, Ryan wrote.

The BOE touted its efforts to install temporary ramps to make polling sites accessible and said its interpretation services follow federal laws.

The board is constantly working to improve its training program, which more than 48,000 poll workers completed in 2016, the response says. The test forces workers to refer to the training manual so they can understand that "comprehensive information is available at their fingertips," Ryan wrote.

The BOE "evaluates the training process on an ongoing basis," he wrote. "As this is a significant undertaking, it is not possible to implement all improvements in a single training year."

Read the full Board of Elections audit here.

(Lead image: New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer speaks at an April 2017 rally. Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)