A bunch of no-counts
More than 48 hours have elapsed since Rep. Charles Rangel was declared the winner in a primary election that was closely watched across America. Yet to the disgrace of the city Board of Elections, there is no way to guess at his margin of victory — or even be certain Rangel will be declared the winner after all.
Although turnout was light, the board botched tallying unofficial results after polls closed. The debacle was predictable, given that it adds up who got what by hand in the most convoluted errorprone process imaginable.
We’ve run through this often, to no avail. Here we go again:
Poll workers have electronic vote-scanning machines print long paper tapes, cut the tapes into sections by election district, add the numbers and enter them on sheets of paper.
Police bring the sheets to stationhouses, where the tallies are entered by hand into a computer for sending to The Associated Press. Elapsed time: many long hours. Error rate: plenty.
On Tuesday night, the board had Rangel ahead of state Sen. Adriano Espaillat by 2,331 votes. The AP reported the result while noticing that 79 election districts showed up with zero votes.
On Wednesday, the AP election unit tracked down the tally sheets for 46 of the districts where there were purportedly no votes. Discovery: Voters had cast ballots, but poll workers had failed to add them. When The AP factored in the new vote counts, Rangel’s margin shrank to 1,075.
As of Thursday evening, sheets for 33 zero-vote districts had not been found. How many votes did they show? Whom were they for? Who knows?
None of the mistakes would have happened if the board had taken advantage of the electronic memory drives that come with the scanners. The process: remove drive, insert in computer, compute. Elapsed time: instant. Error rate: zero.
The Assembly last week passed legislation that would have ordered the board to switch to such a system. It died in the Senate, leaving New Yorkers to face more such fiascoes in September primaries and the November presidential election.
As for the Rangel-Espaillat contest, the board may get an accurate count Friday, when it checks the memory drives that should have been used Tuesday night. But that would have made sense.