In recent months, we have seen some of America’s corporate chieftains weighing in on voting laws in Georgia and Texas. Whether that was part of their remit as CEOs is a different matter (spoiler: No), but, as these executives would never ever, of course, allow themselves to apply one standard to a red (or reddish) state and another to a deep-blue state, it will be interesting to see how many give us their thoughts on the chaos now in danger of overwhelming New York City’s mayoral elections.
Mess-ups can happen, but the problems in counting the votes in the city’s Democratic primary are symptoms of a far deeper dysfunction, and one that has not exactly been a secret.
New Yorkers have endured the incompetence of the city’s Board of Elections for so long that complaints on the subject blend into the background noise of life in a megalopolis, alongside gripes about overstuffed subway cars and putrid piles of sidewalk trash.
This page called the board “at best a semi‐functioning anachronism” — and that was 50 years ago.
Nary an election passes without another reminder of how much contempt the agency has for the city’s vast, diverse electorate. Accidentally purged voter rolls, misaddressed absentee ballots, intolerably long lines. The catalog of dysfunction and neglect seems endless.
Yet somehow the board found a new way to humiliate itself and the city, one week after 800,000 New Yorkers went to the polls to cast ballots in the most consequential mayoral primaries in a generation. Or was it 940,000 New Yorkers? Good question. For several bewildering hours on Tuesday, no one had an answer. . . .
In a tweet, the board pleaded with the public and the candidates for patience. No, patience is something you earn through transparency and competence, two qualities the New York City elections board does not possess. A particularly toxic, century-old vestige of the city’s patronage system, it is run by friends and relatives of political power brokers from both parties, who seem to care for nothing as much as their own incumbency. The board’s 10 commissioners, one Democrat and one Republican from each borough, get their paychecks despite not being trained in election administration — or, it appears, any other civic-minded pursuit.
The board’s commissioners fight sensible efforts to make voting more accessible and reject money — most recently, $20 million from Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016 — that could help make the operation more competent.
City investigations have for decades documented the board’s tribulations in depressingly repetitive language: “inefficiency, laxity and waste”; “illegalities, misconduct, and antiquated operations.” The board’s own staff — who try to do their job with professionalism and honesty — have called it “chronically dysfunctional” and an “insane asylum.” . . .
So, given all this, what will those voluble CEOs have to say?