Tuesday’s voting debacle in Brooklyn, in which more than 100,000 people were purged from Board of Elections records, came down to human error. Or, put more succinctly, a half-assed job done by a veteran elections clerk who skipped steps during what should have been routine maintenance prior to the election.
Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the Board of Election (BOE)’s chief clerk, was trying to clean up the books to eliminate voters who had died, moved, or are otherwise ineligible to vote. She apparently skipped built-in steps to stop the elimination of eligible voters, which led to the error.
On Thursday Haslett-Rudiano was suspended “without pay, effective immediately, pending an internal investigation into the administration of the voter rolls in the Borough of Brooklyn,” the BOE said in a statement.
New York City officials began two separate investigations into the BOE earlier in the week. New York City’s Comptroller Scott Stringer opened the first investigation Tuesday night, with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman following on Wednesday.
Multiple issues had plagued the election, with the biggest appearing to be that some eligible voters were removed from voter-registration rolls and some had their party affiliation changed. Some polls did not open on time.
But it wasn’t just in Brooklyn that voters were having problems. Schneiderman’s hotline received more than 1,000 calls on Election Day across the state reporting problems. At 4 p.m. Nick Benson, Attorney General spokesman, tweeted
As of 3:50, @AGSchneiderman voter hotline received > 700 complaints from voters across NYS. Context: Office received ~150 for '12 general.
— Nick Benson (@nick_benson) April 19, 2016
On Wednesday Election Justice USA, a voter rights organization, went to Federal District Court in Brooklyn to file a pro bono lawsuit to have provisional ballots counted before the primary results are certified.
Yesterday, it appears that Facebook shut down Election Justice’s page, on which it was collecting evidence for the lawsuit. If you have experienced issues with the New York primary, contact Election Justice here.
Featured image by Maryland GovPics, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
