NYC's Election Day Chaos Blamed On Type Of Ballot Only Used Here

NEW YORK CITY HALL — Tear-away ballots used nowhere else in the country were at the root of the chaos New Yorkers experienced on Election Day, a top city election official said Tuesday.

Every borough but Staten Island used a perforated two-page ballot for the first time ever in the Nov. 6 midterm election, said Michael Ryan, the executive director of the city Board of Elections.

State election law uniquely requires ballots with multiple pages to be attached with a perforated edge, Ryan said. But the sheets caused jams in ballot-scanning machines around the city, which had a "ripple effect" of long lines and overtaxed tech support amid massive voter turnout, he said.

"The perforated two-page ballot presented a series of problems never before experienced by the board or anywhere else in the country," Ryan told exasperated City Council members at a Tuesday hearing.

Ryan apologized for the woes that caused interminable waits and confusion for voters. But that didn't quell lawmakers who excoriated the Board of Elections for failing to anticipate the unusual ballot and large crowds.

"It seems like excuse after excuse after excuse," Council Speaker Corey Johnson told Ryan. "The first step to fixing the problem is admitting you have a problem."

The voting mess has led to a firestorm of criticism for the Board of Elections, which is controlled by 10 commissioners appointed by the major political parties. The board has also faced scrutiny in recent years for purging thousands of voters from the rolls ahead of the 2016 presidential primaries.

The board had contemplated the need for a two-page ballot going back to that year and trained field coordinators and field monitors to prepare for them, Ryan said. But this year's problems nonetheless emerged early.

Asked by Councilman Fernando Cabrera when he knew the board was in trouble, Ryan said, "About 6 o'clock in the morning" — when the polls opened.

Bits of paper from the torn ballots gummed up the machines, which likely would not have happened if the pages were separate, Ryan said. Wet paper on a rainy Election Day may have also caused jams, he said, though he didn't mean that was a "blanket cause across the city."

Ryan wasn't able to say exactly how many ballot scanners broke down. But he said poll sites experienced repeat scanner breakdowns at a rate not seen since the machines first went into use in 2010.

Poll workers across the city had to wait an average of 52 and a half minutes for scanners to be fixed, Ryan said; Brooklyn sites faced the longest waits averaging an hour and 15 minutes.

"There was an avalanche early in the morning and we just could never catch up," Ryan said.

Before the ballots caused so many problems, one of the three ballot vendors said at the last minute that it couldn't print them, putting the board in danger of not putting on an election at all, Ryan said.

The Board of Elections has a stock of more than 5,100 scanners but only had about 4,000 deployed in polling sites on Election Day, he said — and only 56 machines were replaced because they had failed.

The unsually high turnout combined with the longer ballot caused the scanning machines to churn through about 4 million pages, nearly double the roughly 2.5 million pages scanned in the 2016 election, Ryan said.

In the future, the board plans to staff poll sites with workers who can quickly fix ballot jams, which can be as simple as using "alcohol wipes and air cans," Ryan said. He also advocated for a program to employ municipal workers as poll workers and changing the state law that requires perforated ballots.

But lawmakers said they lack confidence that the board will be able to make the changes needed to make sure such a snafu doesn't happen again.

"The Board of Elections couldn’t be bothered to properly plan and prepare for those challenges as a professional agency would," said Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Investigations. "And therein lies the sickness in our system: The most vital institution in our democracy, our electoral system, is in the hands of a broken bureaucracy."

(Lead image: Michael Ryan, executive director of the city Board of Elections, testifies before City Council lawmakers on Tuesday. Photo by John McCarten/New York City Council)