Maybe we should ban any local government organization from using the initials BOE, because it seems to translate to bad luck, ossified incompetence, and eager avoidance of accountability.

Five years ago, the New York City Board of Education’s failure to achieve its primary mission began to be widely acknowledged when Mayor Giuliani declared that its headquarters ought to be “blown up” so the city could start over. Soon Hillary Clinton was endorsing education reform and Mayor Bloomberg was able to wrest control of the schools from Albany during his first year in office. The election one week ago provided all the evidence any New Yorker could need to admit that the Board of Elections is overdue for fundamental reform.

The problem, as with the old Board of Education, is not with the intentions of the senior administrators or the purpose of the organization. It lies in the strangulation of reform by state regulations, a bureaucratic black hole of taxpayer dollars, and the “good enough for government work” attitude of too many employees and appointees.

Every generation needs to reform the reforms of the previous generation. Like the old Board of Education, the Board of Elections is insulated from accountability by a system initially designed to protect it from control by City Hall and Tammany Hall. But its principled non-partisan structure has devolved into an equal-opportunity patronage racket for family members of local elected officials.

Among the luminaries who have recently served at the BOE are the father of disgraced and briefly jailed Bronx State Senator Guy Velella, the wife of City Councilman William Perkins, and the mother of Congressman Vito Fossella. It is all in the family at the Board of Election, providing one of the most potent examples of urbanologist Fred Siegel’s accusation that local politics in New York is becoming a family business.

None of this would be so bad if the BOE accomplished its essential task effectively. As far as I’m concerned the whole board can go on unpaid leave from January through July, as long as they are willing to work nonstop for 48 hours on either side of an election. This, as its turns out, is wishful thinking.

This Election Day, after voting, I decided to head down to the polling place nearest Ground Zero to see democracy soldier on near the battlefield. I went to the Board of Elections Web site and found that its online poll locator was inoperable because it was “under construction” – thereby redefining ‘too little too late.’ The site had crashed because the BOE says it can only afford one $150,000 server despite a $78 million dollar annual budget. Frustrated but undaunted, I called the main number. Polls were open for another three hours, but I was treated to a voice mail asking me to call back the next day.

The architect of the BOE Web site, Pablo Martinez, is the among the top overtime earners in city government – he made $78,000 in overtime last year alone. I would trade his overtime efforts in February for a little after-hours service on Election Day from a small fleet of operators.

The tally of election-related disasters goes on. In the run-up to the election, 11,000 new voters were mailed letters telling them they were not eligible to vote until the week after the election. Forty-six thousand voters were found to be registered both in New York and the battleground state of Florida – a federal offense. In Queens, more than five voters were found to be registered at the Flushing bookstore of newly elected Assemblyman Jimmy K. Ming.

On Election Day, voters in one of the few credibly contested congressional races found the names of the two candidates conflated on the ballot – with Republican Vito Fossella and Democrat Frank Barbaro becoming Vito Barbaro on the Conservative line. Voters in SoHo were treated to an art exhibit on the walls of their polling place that compared Attorney General John Ashcroft to a Nazi.

John Ravitz, the embattled but honorable executive director of the Board of Elections, brings to mind late-era public school chancellors like Rudy Crew and Harold Levy. He’s the captain of a ship that started sinking before he got on board but now he has to defend it. Mr. Ravitz is frustrated by criticism because he’s been warning state and local government about the need for more funding if the city is expected to meet the 2006 deadline for computer voting. The state Legislature has still not decided what type of machines the city will be using. Moreover, the current pay scale of Board of Election technicians averages $25,000, something Mr. Ravitz rationally fears will be inadequate to attract computer-savvy technicians in the future.

Beyond the dissatisfaction with red tape and a predictably dysfunctional Albany is the question of why $78 million is not enough to run an agency needed to perform at peak capacity only once a year. The answer lies largely in the earmarking of funds for patronage positions picked by local political leaders. Mayor Bloomberg should work with the governor and Mr. Ravitz to clear out the regulatory cobwebs and dead weight dragging down this essential organization. Mr. Ravitz is right to say that we are entering a “new era of voting,” but we cannot enter it in the current state. Computer voting seems a bit ambitious for an organization that can’t master the telephone or the Internet. It’s time to blow up the BOE and begin again.