Tuesday, November 4, 2014

2000 missing votes from Nov. 2012 election in NY City weren't counted until 2013 though they didn't change outcome of any race-NY Daily News

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7/3/2013, "1,600 votes in Brooklyn from last year’s presidential election were only counted last week in yet another black eye for the NYC Board of Elections," NY Daily News, Celeste Katz

400+ missing ballots from Manhattan were found earlier in 2013 in addition to the 1600 from Brooklyn.
 
"Nearly six months after President Obama began his second term, the votes of some 1,600 Brooklyn residents who went to the polls were not counted until this week, the Daily News has learned.


Good government groups reacted with outrage — saying the bungling raises new questions about the ability of the Board of Elections to conduct an error-free mayoral election later this year....

The board first realized in April (2013) that it might have a problem with the November vote tally. An audit discovered a mismatch between the number of Brooklyn voters who signed in at the polls and the number of votes that were counted, officials said.

A board investigation narrowed the problem to two optical scanners at two poll sites — Brooklyn Borough Hall and the Carroll Gardens Public Library.

Voters cast ballots on those machines, but the data never got uploaded into the Board of Elections database and the votes were not counted.

Using the paper trail from the two scanners, officials counted the results by hand, a process only completed last week. Meeting on Tuesday — 238 days after Election Day — the Board of Elections added the totals to the official vote count....


This is not the first time the Board of Elections has had to update results. 

In March, workers in the agency’s Manhattan office unearthed more than 400 ballots cast in November but which were never tabulated....

The totals
did not change the outcome of any race, from the presidential contest to those further down the ballot. But as history has shown, a tiny margin can have major ramifications in a local election.

In the 2005 Democratic primary for mayor, Fernando Ferrer staved off a runoff by getting just 720 votes more than the 40% he needed to win the race outright."...







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