Yeah, ballot bungle was our bad: Bill

An error made by Mayor de Blasio’s office resulted in 30,000 people incorrectly receiving letters telling them their voting registration was inactive, the vendor who provided the city its voter list said — a revelation that comes after de Blasio sought to minimize the problem and deflect blame.

The letters — which told some active voters they were inactive — were so confusing and vaguely signed that many voters who received them thought they were being scammed in a voter suppression attempt.

The explanation of how some active voters were sent the letters came after days of de Blasio’s administration blaming it on bad data from others — first the New York City Board of Elections, then Civis Analytics, a software vendor that has contracted with the mayor’s Public Engagement Unit to provide voter registration info.

“The key word there from what we understand is very few, you know, some, but very few were inaccurate,” de Blasio said Thursday afternoon at an unrelated press conference. “Look, any database has the chance of being imperfect. Apparently that was a database we got from the Board of Elections.”

But Thursday, Civis said there was nothing wrong with that database after all— it was how the information was filtered that caused the trouble.

“After learning of the errors associated with New York City’s inactive voter letter campaign, Civis assisted the city in conducting an extensive analysis to identify the root of the problem. Together we determined that the error lies not in the data itself, but in the way the list was filtered from the original dataset,” the company said in a statement.

Civis said that the mayor’s office filtered the data. Raul Contrearas, a spokesman for the mayor, said that they “worked with Civis to filter the list.”

"A small portion of the list received the mailing in error,” Contrearas said. “The vast majority of the list was correctly alerted to their inactive voter status.”