RUN BY A ‘RANK’ AMATEUR
Aide now in charge of Elex Bd. ‘a disaster’
The head of the city Board of Elections that is now embroiled in controversy over the botched mayoral-primary count has been on medical leave for months, leaving the already struggling agency in the hands of his assistant, The Post has learned.
Board of Elections Executive Director Mike Ryan’s deputy, Dawn Sandow, is a Bronx Republican political appointee, whom a fellow GOP official described as unqualified to run the board for the city’s first mayoral rankedchoice election.
“She is a disaster,” said the source. “She isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”
Sandow, who for years worked for former state Sen. Guy Velella, has long wielded a “strong hand” at the embattled, patronageladen agency, a City Council source told The Post. Velella in 2002 was indicted on 25 bribery and conspiracy counts.
Ryan didn’t appear at the BOE’s council budget hearing in May, when Sandow took his place.
Ryan on Tuesday told The Post from his Staten Island home that he has Stage 4 cancer. He has been on leave since March, as Sandow has taken the helm of the agency, the BOE confirmed.
Sandow was not at a Bronx address listed in public records when The Post tried to reach her for comment, and didn’t answer the door of an address listed in Rockland County, although a neighbor said she lived there.
“Ms. Sandow has worked for the board since 2005 and served as our deputy executive director for over a decade,” a BOE spokeswoman said. “She served as acting executive director from 2010 to 2013. She has helped oversee the implementation of the new voting system, launch election-night reporting and early voting.”
In 2006, Sandow was appointed deputy chief clerk at the board’s Bronx offices, after serving as executive director of the county’s Republican Party beginning in 1998. Sandow
She is a disaster. She isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.
voted in The Bronx from 2001 through 2004 and in 2006 while living in New City, Rockland County, the city Department of Investigation found in 2008.
She joined the BOE after serving as a top aide to Velella, who dominated the Bronx GOP at the time.
On Tuesday, the mayoral-primary election was thrown into a state of chaos when first-round leader Eric Adams and others noted that the preliminary results released in the afternoon showed 941,832 votes were cast for the Democratic mayoral nomination — a significant increase from the 799,827 ballots counted on primary day.
The BOE then issued a statement citing an “irregularity” before pulling the vote tallies from its Web site. It explained late Tuesday that the discrepancy was caused by accidentally including about 135,000 “test” results in the vote count.
The BOE is run by commissioners selected by the county Democratic and Republican parties, a state constitutional dictate, and has largely quashed reform efforts. Because they don’t answer to the governor or mayor, little has been done to overhaul operations.
Tuesday’s ballot botch represented the latest — and maybe worst — in several years of missteps by the BOE. The board admitted to violating election laws by purging 200,000 voters from its rolls ahead of the 2016 presidential primary. That year, 20 percent of trained poll workers didn’t show up to work on Election Day.
In 2018, high humidity on Election Day rendered inoperable new ballot scanners that cost a total of $56 million.
And during the 2020 presidential primaries, the board disqualified 80,000 ballots because officials weren’t ready to handle the increase in mailed votes cast due to in-person voting concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.