by Holly LeCraw

Previously posted certified results on left; on right, the results page as it appears on May 18

On May 6, New York City certified the results of its April 19 primary, despite strenuous protest from voters and a lawsuit to delay the certification of the tally. Now those results, which had been posted on the New York City Board of Elections website, have disappeared. Activists are questioning whether their recent hard questioning of the Board had anything to do with the disappearance, and are also skeptical of assertions commissioner Michael Ryan has given about the intensity of the affidavit ballot review.

Since the primary, dozens of people have testified in public meetings about rampant polling irregularities on Election Day, and also that their registrations had been switched or removed altogether, forcing them to vote by affidavit ballot. The NYC Board of Elections has admitted to purging over 126,000 Democratic voters in Brooklyn alone ahead of Election Day, in a move they once characterized as delayed but necessary housekeeping. However, in the wake of the primary, the BOE chief clerk and deputy clerk have been suspended without pay, pending further investigation into the purge. On April 19, over 120,000 affidavit ballots were submitted in the five boroughs of New York City, with 25% ultimately being counted.

NYC Board of Elections Commissioner Michael Ryan has publicly stated that prior to certification, the NYCBOE thoroughly audited all initially rejected affidavits in an “intensive” effort that was “over and above the routine process.” At yesterday’s NYCBOE public meeting, Ryan further said that, in the audit, “We printed every document that we have in the system for a voter” for each affidavit. These documents will be retained for 2 years, as prescribed by law. Ryan further noted that in an unrelated review of 176 ballots where all voters’ documents were printed, the stack of paper was “10 inches high.” “Extrapolate that out for 20,000 affidavits…that’s a lot of paper,” Ryan said.

The number of rejected affidavits was, in fact, over 90,000; when pressed, Ryan said he did not have the numbers. It’s worth noting that for 90,000 affidavits, the stack of printed documents, if Ryan’s description is accurate, would be 42 feet high — several hundred reams of paper. What were the associated printing costs? Where will this documentation be stored?

There is no provision for citizen witnesses to the affidavit review, unlike the ballot audits and affidavit processing that take place prior to certification.

At a separate meeting yesterday, of the Voter Assistance Advisory Committee of the Campaign Finance Board, which did not include members of the Board of Elections but was available for public viewing on a livestream, public comments were also taken. Brian Douglas of New York Election Justice, a citizen advocacy group, who was present, says he “called into question the feasibility of conducting the kind of thorough and intensive audit that Michael Ryan is claiming his staff pulled off, based on the sheer number of ballots and the process he’s now claiming they went through.”

The VAAC, along with the City Council, have been openly critical of the BOE and its level of competency.

Douglas pointed out that if the “secondary and tertiary” affidavit review process, as Ryan called it, required just two minutes per affidavit, staffers would need to put in 3000 hours of work. It’s not known how many workers were involved in the review; Douglas asked for that number at the May 17 BOE meeting but Ryan did not have an immediate answer. But if there were, for instance, 50 people working exclusively on the review, each worker would need to spend 60 hours. If five minutes were spent with each affidavit, as seems more reasonable given Ryan’s description, the person-hours jump to 150 per worker. There were 11 business days between the primary and the day of certification.

Activists noticed around midnight last night that the certified election results had disappeared from the NYCBOE website. Douglas notes that he has downloads and screenshots from yesterday of the posted results, with a time stamp. “I find it suspicious that the results would disappear after a public hearing — and at a government agency that genuinely seemed concerned about voters’ rights [the VAAC] — where so much more credible testimony about irregularities was given, and there was so much skeptiscism about the authenticity of the results,” Douglas said. “Luckily, we have held on to the databases that were available prior to the link’s disappearance, and will be comparing them once the links are back up.”

Messages to the NYCBOE’s Office of Communication and Public Affairs have so far gone unanswered. City Councilman Ben Kallos, who is the Chair of the Council’s Committee on Government Operations, is also inquiring. As of this writing, the links to the certified results have not reappeared.

note: 5/19 — this article has been edited to include further calculations and observations about the BOE’s affidavit review process.

Update — 5/19, 2:30 p.m.: The results are now back up and appear at first glance to be unchanged. So far, no word about why they disappeared, or were down for so long; recertification — adding to certified results — is common, usually with small numbers of votes, and would not require so much time to update.