New York City Board Of Elections are very shitty at math

 

NY Post

The embattled city Board of Elections mismanaged key facets of its early voting program, The Post has learned, including allocating ballot scanners with little regard for demand and stuffing so many voters into balloting sites that it overwhelmed its system.

The examination of the BOE’s preparations comes as thousands of New York City voters again faced hours-long lines Wednesday to cast their votes in the hotly contested 2020 general election, giving the patronage-ladened agency its latest black eye.

Take two locations in Brooklyn: The BOE only sent five ballot scanners to the New York City College of Technology on Jay Street, even though it assigned more than 60,000 voters to the site for early voting. And Barclay’s Center was allocated the same number of scanners, despite being the early voting spot for another 32,000.

That pattern repeats in Manhattan. The Board of Elections provided only five scanners to the early voting polling site at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua in SoHo, despite assigning it nearly 81,000 voters — roughly one scanner per 16,000 voters.

Just a seven-minute walk away, BOE also set up its smallest early voting polling site in the city at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts near Washington Square Park. However, officials set up three scanners for the 8,300 voters who can use the site — roughly one scanner for every 2,800 voters.

The Post sent reporters to 15 early voting sites in the two boroughs and found the scanners were unevenly distributed and that even busiest sites had no more than seven such devices.

“It makes no sense, it shows you how poor their planning is and how unprepared they were for people to use early voting,” said John Kaehny, the executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany. “I think the BOE has completely misallocated resources and failed to the simple math to figure out how many poll books and scanners it needs based on the number of likely voters.”