Calling customer service
This week's clown-show performance by the New York City Board of Elections certainly isn't its first pie in the face.
The infamous office is loaded with patronage hires, including relatives and former flunkies of powerful or once-powerful city elected officials. It improperly purged roughly 200,000 registered voters from the rolls in 2016, failed to address equipment failures that led to hourslong lines in 2018, and bungled the distribution of absentee ballots in 2020. Did anyone expect something different this year?
In any system that demands accountability, the current board and many of its employees would have been canned years ago. Instead, the office rose to the complex challenge of administering the city's first ranked-choice election by ignoring offers of IT support from its vendors and then mixing in 135,000 test votes in the preliminary Democratic mayoral results reported Wednesday afternoon. Why the test votes identified actual candidates as opposed to such easily erased fictional figures as Betty Boop, Han Solo and the chipmunks Chip 'n' Dale is beyond me — but knowing the level of competence of the board, it's entirely possible one of them could have ended up as the Democratic mayoral nominee.
Lawmakers in the state Senate responded to public outrage by promising hearings. Comprehensive reform is badly needed, but will take years: Because New York's constitution hands over to the top two political parties the job of selecting the people who run our elections, we often end up with incompetent hacks being rewarded for little more than partisan loyalty.
This isn't just a county-level problem. The state Board of Elections has in the decade-plus in which I've paid attention to it included dim bulbs as well as officials whose central loyalty was to partisan advantage instead of running the smoothest and most above-board voting available through policy and technology.
The blame goes all the way up to the state Legislature and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, which just last month installed as the state board's top enforcement counsel a Dormitory Authority lawyer named Michael Johnson whose experience enforcing election law is both brief and 15 years in the past. Johnson, however, has far greater experience as an aide to the late Assemblyman Denny Farrell. If ever there was a post where a chummy insider is precisely the wrong person for the job, this is it.
Or so it might seem from the perspective of the general public, as opposed to elected officials who would rather not have to contend with a hard-charging watchdog. This attitude was on display once again last week in the regular meeting of another state entity of dubious quality, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics. It happened on Tuesday, just a day before the New York City election board's face plant.
As reported by the Times Union's Chris Bragg, the meeting included a proposal to refer to the state attorney general's office the matter of an alleged leak of the confidential proceedings of a January 2019 JCOPE session. That earlier meeting almost certainly included con
sideration of a request for an investigation of former Cuomo aide Joe Percoco's use of state resources to benefit the governor's 2014 re-election campaign. Immediately after the 2019 meeting, two JCOPE commissioners became aware that Cuomo had groused about how they had voted.
Both of those commissioners were appointed by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. One of them, Julie Garcia, was called by Heastie's counsel Howard Vargas; the other, James Yates, was contacted by the Speaker himself — a fact that Heastie has done his best to avoid confirming for more than a year and a half, but was finally forced to admit to our reporter on Friday. It was either that or call Yates a liar.
In a statement to Bragg, Heastie said that on the day in question “I received a blistering call from the governor that was less than a minute in which he ranted to me about numerous things that he was upset about, including JCOPE.” To repeat:
Yates stated on Tuesday that the rant involved how he had voted that day.
Yates also told his fellow commissioners he didn't know if anyone from the state Inspector General's office, which was tasked with investigating the leak, ever asked the governor how he had obtained that confidential information. Yates apparently doesn't read the Times Union, because we've reported several times that the IG never spoke to Cuomo or Heastie about the matter. It was, in other words, a total tank job designed to keep both leaders from having to answer questions under oath.
One of Heastie's more recent JCOPE appointees, Richard Braun, also abstained on Tuesday, saying he wasn't familiar with the matter; Cuomo appointee Colleen Dipirro abstained for reasons she expressed so poorly that I became worried she had just suffered a head injury. I'd be happy to send them some articles on this affair if they're interested in fulfilling their roles as state ethics officials. The proposal was defeated after all of Cuomo's other nominees voted against it.
The IG investigator who handled the probe, Spencer Freedman, recently took a job under former Cuomo aide turned handpicked SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras, whose work for the governor's COVID-19 task force has been the subject of public criticism and federal interest.
To restate an earlier point: If elections and ethics enforcement were services provided by a private business, you'd sue for breach of contract or gross negligence. But nothing's going to change unless the public demands a product that actually functions as advertised.