The New York City Board of Elections has, once again, undermined New Yorkers’ faith in our elections. New Yorkers deserve election administrators that can effectively get the job done. Instead, we have an outdated partisan structure that allows for crucial positions to be filled through patronage, resulting in mistakes being made over and over and over again. Last week’s inclusion of 130,000 dummy votes in the initial ranked choice tally must be the last straw.
It feels like Groundhog Day every election cycle.
We just want to be clear: this is not ranked choice voting’s fault. The same politicians blaming ranked choice voting for the BOE’s failure are protecting the status quo because it benefits them. Adopted overwhelmingly by NYC voters as a fairer way to decide crowded primary races, ranked choice voting operates successfully in many regions of the country. But the NYC BOE has produced a series of failures that started long before ranked choice voting came to NYC. As recently as 2020, the Board disenfranchised thousands of voters by misprinting absentee ballots. Does that mean people shouldn’t be allowed to vote absentee? Of course not.
