User:Mtg9991/sandbox

History and criticism[edit]
The Board has come under fire for errors and mismanagement in a number of elections:


 * In 2010, George Gonzalez, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, was fired following reports of widespread mismanagement during the 2010 primaries. Failure to successfully implement a new system of electronic voting led to late openings and long lines at many polling sites throughout the city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg subsequently condemned the widespread nepotism at the New York City Board of elections as he called for reform.
 * After a closely fought special election for the state Senate in March 2012, two good-government groups, Common Cause New York and New York Public Interest Research Group, criticized the Board for a "byzantine" and "excruciating" vote-counting process attributable to "a paper-and-scissors, multiple-person process the city Board of Elections says it must, by state law, follow for vote tabulating and reporting." Similar complaints were raised following the June 2012 primary election, especially with respect to delays in accurate vote-counting and reporting for the closely fought New York's 13th congressional district Democratic primary. The election issues, which came after the Board's Manhattan headquarters were shut down by Hurricane Sandy, were criticized by the news media and the public, as well as Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who called the Board "worse than The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight"). Board members lamented the issues and decided to work to seek improvements to its processes, although they also rejected criticism as unfair.


 * During the April 2016 primary election, many Brooklyn voters were surprised and angered to learn that they had been purged from the voting rolls (their voter registrations were canceled). The board's chief clerk in Brooklyn was suspended shortly after the primary. City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer and State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman both opened investigations against the board, and in November 2016, Common Cause New York filed a lawsuit against the Board. The U.S. Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's Office both subsequently moved to join the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleged that the Board had improperly carried out a voter purge in late 2013 or early 2014 that violated federal law. The purge affected some 125,000 Democratic voters. It aimed to remove people who had not voted since 2008 from the voter rolls, but the lawsuit alleged that (1) the Board had failed to check whether the removed persons had died or moved out of the city, as required by federal law and (2) more than 4,100 of the voters flagged for removal had in fact voted at least once since 2008. In November 2017, the Board settled the lawsuit, entering into a consent decree in which the Board admitted that the purges were unlawful and agreed to reform and monitoring dealing with voter registration, list maintenance, and staff training; the Board also agreed "to review every voter registration cancelled since July 1, 2013, determine whether the cancellations were justified under law, and reinstate, to appropriate status, any registrations that were improperly cancelled."


 * On November 5th, 2019, New York City voters approved ballot Ballot Question 1, updating the City Charter to give voters “the choice of ranking up to five candidates in primary and special elections for Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller, Borough President, and City Council beginning in January 2021.” If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and the second-place choice becomes the first-place choice for individuals who had the eliminated candidate as their original first-choice. The cycle is repeated by means of an automated system until one candidate receives a majority of the first place votes. Critics of ranked-choice voting such as city councilwoman Alicka Ampry-Samuel and Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams have called for a postponement of the policy’s implantation, questioning the Board of Elections’ readiness to implement the new system of voting and properly educate the public.
 * In September 2020, the Board was criticized after up to 100,000 Brooklyn voters received absentee ballots with incorrect names and addresses. The error involved "mismatched names and addresses on the outer and inner mail-back envelopes" and was attributed to a vendor's printing error. The mayor and voters criticized the BOE for the failure.