Vote scanners weren’t up to snuff: elex big
Between the huge turnout, the rain and cumbersome paper ballots, the 2018 midterm election was a huge bungle for city election bureaucrats.
Scanners broke down everywhere, creating major delays that forced some voters to walk away. Thousands of ballots were collected to be scanned later. More than 800 callers dialed 311 to complain about poll sites or poll workers, way up from the 673 calls during the 2016 presidential election.
Between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. Tuesday, 56 scanners had to be taken out of service, according to Board of Elections Director Michael Ryan.
On Wednesday, Ryan conceded the scanners were unable to process the two-page ballots effectively when a stunning 1.9 million voters showed up.
“In four out of five boroughs, we had a two-page ballot. That means 4 million pieces of paper passed through scanners,” he said. “This was unprecedented scanner use, the likes of which we have not seen in any elections before yesterday. The immediate lesson learned is that if we have high volume and two pages, these particular machines are not capable of processing that volume accurately . ... Speed becomes an issue.”
“If I had a crystal ball, we would have acted differently,” he said. “But we’re human beings.”
But many of these problems weren’t a surprise to the Board of Elections.
At an Oct. 16 board meeting discussing preparations for Election Day, Commissioner Michael Michel voiced concern that the bulky, two-page, 19inch ballots in Brooklyn and Queens had a tendency to jam scanners.
And BOE Director Ryan red-flagged another potential problem: Ballots that couldn’t be scanned were to be placed in plastic bins; he worried there wouldn’t be enough to hold the ballots.
The board did assign a greater-than-normal number of technicians but otherwise moved forward as planned, promising to reexamine these issues later. As the board’s minutes note: “The board’s election equipment and ballot scenarios will be looked into further in the future.”
Sure enough, scanners jammed up all over Brooklyn. Voters were forced to drop ballots into overflowing bins.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams — who fielded calls about scanners at 49 sites on his turf — said at multiple sites he visited “the paper was stuck and the poll workers had to wait for someone to take the paper jam out.”
“How about teaching the poll workers how to do the basic unclogging of the paper in the scanner so we can continue the process of going forward?” Adams said.
And as machines failed and bins reached capacity, technicians scrambled from one site to another trying to keep up.
On Wednesday Mayor de Blasio asked why the board wasn’t better prepared given that a large turnout was expected and the unusually large ballot was a given.
“The size of the ballot was not a shock. The Board of Elections was planning on that for a long time. The fact that it might rain — you know, it rains sometimes on Election Day. This is not a news flash,” he said. “Many New Yorkers couldn’t vote in privacy. Many New Yorkers stood in lines at least an hour, in some cases two or three hours. It’s as if there was a purposeful plan to make voting as unappealing as possible.”
And a spokesman for City Council Speaker Corey Johnson announced he’d hold hearings “to explore why so many scanners went down, as New Yorkers deserve better than what they experienced at the polls yesterday.”
Ryan said after the election results are certified in the coming days, the board will do its own autopsy on what went wrong.
“For the voters there’s a learning curve there and there’s a learning curve for us,” he said. “Clearly we will modify our actions.”