Inside the turmoil at the agency that is running ranked-choice voting in New York

NEW YORK >> As New Yorkers began to cast ballots in the first citywide election with ranked-choice voting, turmoil quietly roiled the government agency overseeing the election.

The agency, the New York City Board of Elections, had lost its executive director and one of his top deputies just weeks before early voting. It was being pressured to change its plan for releasing results.

And as Primary Day approached on June 22, the board’s remaining leaders had repeatedly declined help with the ranked-choice software and delayed training for employees, creating confusion among the staff.

On Tuesday, as the city eagerly awaited results in the mayoral primary and other major races, the problems burst into public view when the agency released preliminary ranked-choice vote totals — only to retract them hours later, acknowledging that they were no longer trustworthy.

Officials explained that the board had mistakenly included more than 130,000 test ballots in the preliminary count. A new ranked-choice tally was run Wednesday, and the top-line results were unchanged: Eric Adams, who had the most first-place votes on primary night, was still the first choice, but by a far narrower numerical margin over his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia.

The results, however, seemed almost anticlimactic, with the memory of Tuesday’s snafu still causing outrage across the city and renewing calls for changes at the elections board. It also resurrected long-held frustrations about the barriers that have persistently blocked reforms at the agency, despite decades of blunders and scandals.

“It’s just one fiasco after another, year after year,” said Lulu Friesdat, executive director of Smart Elections, an elections reform group. “The fact that we haven’t made the effort to change that is shocking. It’s appalling.”

New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican party bosses. The system is meant to ensure fairness by empowering the parties to watch each other, but for decades the board in New York City has been criticized for nepotism, ineptitude and corruption.

On Wednesday, facing anger and ridicule from across the political spectrum — including in a statement sent by former President Donald J. Trump — leaders in the New York state Senate and Assembly vowed to hold hearings to finally tackle problems at the board.

“The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with promptly and properly,” said Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat who leads the Senate, in a statement. “In the coming weeks, the Senate will be holding hearings on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as a result at the earliest opportunity.”

Even as lawmakers promised reforms, the board acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that it had been operating through the election season without much of its leadership team.

Michael Ryan, who has served as the board’s executive director since 2013, has been on medical leave since early March, and Pamela Perkins, the agency’s administrative manager, retired on June 1 after nearly two decades in the position, a spokeswoman confirmed.

The leadership vacuum — during an intense election, with a new method of voting — caused tumult at the board for months, several employees said.

As the board dealt with those issues, it also ignored offers of technological assistance from the supplier of the software that it would use to tabulate the ranked-choice votes.

The supplier, Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, first offered to help on May 26 and then tried again several times, said its policy director, Christopher W. Hughes.

“We had offered up to the Board of Elections to be there in person or remotely and support running the ranked-choice voting election,” Hughes said Wednesday.

Hughes said the resource center could have run a parallel process, using the same data and a copy of the same software, to ensure that the results matched. Doing so would have made it more likely that they would have caught the test ballots that were inadvertently added to the tally Tuesday, he said.

Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a spokesperson for the elections board, declined to address the substance of Hughes’ assertion.

Instead, she reiterated the board’s position that the problem was not caused by the software, but by the agency’s staff.

“The issue was not the software,” Vazquez-Diaz said. “There was a human error where a staffer did not remove the test ballot images from the Election Management System.”

The board also got a late start in testing the software to generate the ranked-choice results because of an impasse with the state Board of Elections that took more than a year to resolve. As recently as a month before the election, the board still faced the possibility of having to count hundreds of thousands of ballots by hand.

Only on May 25 did the state board give a green light to the city board’s preferred software package, known as the Universal Ranked-Choice Voting Tabulator.

Douglas Kellner, the co-chairman of the state Board of Elections, said the delay was caused by the city election board itself, as well as resistance from Republicans on the state board.

“The city Board of Elections had other priorities, that was one issue,” Kellner said. “And when they finally got around to saying, ‘We have a ranked-choice voting election next year,’ the Republicans at the state Board of Elections started dragging their feet, because they question whether the city even had the authority to amend the charter to provide for this system of voting. So that added several months of additional delay.”

Delays also plagued the plan to train employees on the software and ranked-choice voting itself, workers said. Two employees said they did not receive training until after early voting had already begun.

A final challenge emerged when the board leaders struggled to decide how and when to release the results of the ranked-choice voting.

The debate about when to release results surfaced as early as December, at an oversight hearing of the City Council.

At that hearing, Councilman Fernando Cabrera opened with a warning that now sounds prescient.

“2021 is the biggest year for local races in recent memory, with open contests for all citywide offices and two-thirds of the City Council seats,” he said. “We cannot afford to get this wrong.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.