MAYOR’S DUMBOCRACY
Blaz voter drive sparks election chaos — tells 400,000 they are not on rolls, but many are!
Mayor de Blasio's new office for promoting civic engagement could be suppressing turnout on Election Day by confusing hundreds of thousands of registered voters with letters telling them, incorrectly in many cases, that they've been kicked off the rolls.
Bronx voter David Wuchinich got a notification in the mail telling him, “According to publicly available records, you were marked as an inactive voter by the New York City Board of Elections.”
Problem is Wuchinich is an active voter — very active, in fact.
“I've voted in every, every election, every primary,” said Wuchinich, who called the Board of Elections and confirmed that he is registered in good standing at his current address.
Wuchinich is one of 400,000 people who got that letter from de Blasio's “Democracy NYC” program — a letter that was so confusing and inaccurate that many voters thought they had been scammed by someone looking to suppress turnout in the midterm elections.
“Voters have been calling expressing concern that this was a scam, that somehow they were being scammed and being told that they were not registered to vote and that it was some form of voter suppression,” Michael Ryan, the chairman of the Board of Elections, said Tuesday. “So that's another kind of a complication in this process, and we would just like to get the word out to folks you can go on the state Board of Elections website run your name make sure that you're still active.”
The letter had led to 1,600 worried phone calls to the Board of Elections as of Tuesday afternoon, though it was unclear how many of those callers were active voters.
The misguided missive was sent by the mayor's new Democracy office — a muchtouted effort to get more people to vote, headed by Ayirini Fonseca-Sabune (inset), who is paid a $165,000 city salary.
It's unclear if the letter was Fonseca-Sabune's idea — because it's signed by “The City of New York,” not a specific person. The bottom of the letter includes the Democracy NYC office's logo and slogan.
The de Blasio administration tried to dismiss the confusion.
“A very small group of active voters may have received inaccurate letters from the city identifying them as inactive voters,” the mayor's spokesman, Eric Phillips, said. “We're working to get to the bottom of why the mailing list used, which originated with the city Board of Elections, seems to have led to this error. To those who received the letter and are understandably confused, and to those who didn't receive a letter but want to check their voting status, please visit voting.nyc to ensure you're on the rolls.”
The office's goal is to promote voting. But scrupulous voter Wuchinich feared it could do the opposite.
“My thought was people who maybe don't pursue it would think, oh my God, well they don't have me listed, I guess I can't vote,” he said. “I could see that being a reaction among some people, which is not good.”
The city did not get its list of inactive voters from the Board of Elections, but from a thirdparty vendor, Civis Analytics, the mayor's office said. It is common for such vendors to buy data from the board, typically for the use of campaigns, but Ryan cautioned that such data is only fully accurate the day it is purchased — people can become inactive or active once again.
“We don't know what the criteria was” to generate that mailing list,” Ryan said. “Once the recipient receives the data from us, they then can sort and rearrange the data in any way.”
The letter was dated Oct. 11 — just a day before the deadline for new registrations. It was received by many voters on Oct. 15 — just two days before the deadline to change your address with the Board of Elections. The mayor's office did not respond to several questions about the timing and intent of the letter.
The erroneous epistle left some voters fuming.
“What really upset me was once it was brought to their attention, the mayor's office seemed to be implying they didn't really do anything wrong,” Kim Moscaritolo, a Democratic district leader on the Upper West Side, said. “Clearly, people were disturbed by the letter, upset by it, extremely confused.”
She feared the letter would lead to a last-minute election board backlog of unnecessary applications to register from people fearing they were inactive.
“It just sort of confirms what people already think — which is that our elections are under attack and people are being purged for no reason. It just causes a lot of, I think, unnecessary stress on people,” she said.