The New York City Board of Elections faces scrutiny around every election — at least, it seems that way in recent years.
There was the flawed tally of ranked-choice votes in 2021; misprinted absentee ballot envelopes and long lines during early voting in 2020; voting machines that choked on wet ballots in 2018; a voter purge ahead of the 2016 presidential primary that inadvertently removed thousands of people from the rolls; and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which upended poll sites and led to a change in affidavit ballot rules the day before the election.
On Tuesday, as the city deployed more than 20,000 poll workers to some 1,000 poll sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, for two dozen City Council primaries, two boroughwide district attorney primaries and dozens of other judicial and party positions on the ballot, the day was far less dramatic.
Turnout was low as anticipated, with turnout in competitive races like in the 9th Council District in Harlem only reaching 11% and clocking in at the single digits in other cases. But with fewer voters came fewer problems.
As one of the city’s top elections officials stressed, the agency also took careful and meticulous steps to get it right — knowing full well the criticism it faced in the past.
“We have humans, so we have human error like every other agency in the city of New York,” said Vincent Ignizio, the deputy executive director of the New York City Board of Elections and the agency’s main spokesperson. “Our goal is to just run free and fair elections and basically get out of the way, let the voters do what it is they need to do and be as error-free as possible.”
Ignizio, who took the post of deputy executive director in December 2021, said the agency made changes to personnel and procedures to prevent the kind of erroneous ranked-choice tally the city board briefly published in the June 2021 mayoral primary, the first citywide test of the new voting system. The error occurred the week after the…
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