Buffoon of the Week Staff
Elections officials have one job: administer a fair election. Apparently, that simple task is too much for the New York City Board of Elections.
According to THE CITY, NYC Board of Elections sent absentee ballots to Brooklyn voters with return envelopes with some strangers’ names and addresses printed on it.
Victoria Edel, of Sheepshead Bay, said she received a return envelope with the name and address of a woman who lives one street away and has a last name that begins with a D.
“This is not my ballot, we have this random lady’s ballot — it’s like they messed this up in a big way,” said Edel, 28.
A spokesperson of the NYC Board of Elections chalked the errors up to a third-party vendor’s mistake. Apparently, the NYC BOE hired Phoenix Graphics of Rochester, N.Y.to print and distribute absentee ballots in Brooklyn and Queens.
The magnitude of the NYC BOE’s eff-up is not known, as there is no apparent accountability from either the BOE or the vendor. Shockingly, The NYC Board of Elections is apparently relying on voters to find the individual errors for them:
And the complaints keep rolling in.
Our Take….
You. Had. One. Job.
For those of you who don’t know how the NYC Board of Elections works, it is comprised of 10 Commissioners – a Democrat and a Republican from each of the five boroughs. It oversees a merry band of patronage hires from both parties who are supposed to work in tandem to prepare each election, to keep election records, maintain election equipment and train temporary election staff to work the polls on election day.
Here’s the problem with that:
There are no quality checks. There is no accountability. Everyone is a friend of a friend of someone. And, in many instances, they employ the unemployable. And the Brooklyn BOE, or as the Daily News once dubbed it, the Board of Incompetence, is one of the worst offenders. You may also recall how the Brooklyn Board of Elections purged Bernie Sanders voters right before the 2016 primary. We can relay many other stories that didn’t make the papers (Gene is a NYC election attorney), but you get the idea.
This is the latest in an election season fraught with errors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is during high-pressure situations such as these where Buffoons show themselves for who they are. COVID-19 has shown the worst of NYC government. That is the case here with the incompetent NYC Board of Elections.
