Elections Board Could Face Grilling Over Primary Numbers

The city's Board of Elections is coming under heightened scrutiny and may face a grilling from the City Council after initial, unofficial vote results from the February 5 presidential primary undercounted Senator Obama's vote totals and showed him winning no votes in dozens of election districts across the city.

The chairman of the council's Governmental Operations Committee, Simcha Felder, is calling for hearings to examine the way unofficial election results are announced.

"The irregularities in the unofficial presidential primary election results warrant further examination," he told The New York Sun yesterday. "The New York State election process is especially susceptible to human error, and unfortunately these occurrences are frequent."

About 80 election districts in New York initially reported that Mr. Obama received no votes, but tallies released later from the Board of Elections showed that the Illinois senator did collect votes in some of those districts.

The discrepancies could help critics who are calling for reforms shore up support for their cause, including Mayor Bloomberg. Last month, during his annual State of the City address, Mr. Bloomberg said the Board of Elections "desperately needs modernization" and is "perhaps the only agency that still has the party bosses directly calling the shots," according to prepared remarks of his speech. Mr. Bloomberg announced that he would work to build a nonpartisan coalition to press the Democratic- and Republican-controlled board to hire employees based on merit and not party ties.

A spokesman for the mayor declined to comment on the preliminary vote counts in the presidential primary. The discrepancies were first reported in the New York Times.

A spokeswoman for the city's Board of Elections, Valerie Vazquez, sought to distance the board from the unofficial numbers released after the presidential primary, saying yesterday that she expects the final results to be certified on February 26 after every voting machine is opened and every paper ballot counted.

"It was just human error, but it happens all the time," she said. "That's why we always say, 'Those are not our numbers.'"

On election night, election inspectors write down the total tally recorded by a voting machine and give the tally sheet to a police officer. The officer takes it to a police precinct and puts the numbers into a computer system. The results are sent to the Associated Press, and the Board of Elections has access to them as well.

Ms. Vazquez said the process to count votes for certification has built-in oversight, with a Republican and a Democrat present when elections officials open up voting machines and paper ballots.

This level of discrepancy "is normal," she said.

A former parks commissioner and director of New York Civic, Henry Stern, said he thinks the election workers who misstated the number of votes Mr. Obama collected on Super Tuesday should be fired or, at the very least, fined.

"It's certainly a more serious offense than a parking ticket to give any candidate no votes. Doesn't matter if it's Hillary or Obama. Such incompetence should result in some sanction, but it's highly unlikely it will happen because the whole Board of Elections is so lame," he said.

A partner at the political consulting firm Prime New York, Gerald Skurnik, said concerns about the vote discrepancies are a "tempest in a teapot."

He said the process to collect the unofficial vote tally is like a game of telephone, and errors like this happen all the time. He said the unofficial results are not completely accurate because they are, quite simply, unofficial.

Richard Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union, an advocacy group working with Mr. Bloomberg to reform the Board of Elections, said the discrepancies are "crying for an investigation" and raise "serious concerns about the way in which votes are tabulated in New York and points to either serious mistakes being made or incompetence by personnel collecting and tabulating the votes." "The fact that this presidential race is so close and this is Hillary's home state raises questions that need to be asked about what exactly happened," he said.