Another NYC election fiasco feeds Trump conspiracy theories

NEW YORK — For months, President Donald Trump has made baseless claims of voter fraud, insisted he would only lose an election that was “rigged” and said he is rushing a Supreme Court nominee ahead of a potential legal challenge to the results.

Democrats and published media reports have widely disputed his assertions and officials have promised a valid voting process, despite the unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic.

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Then along came the New York City Board of Elections.

The notoriously dysfunctional entity has given ammo to Trump’s charges by mailing some 100,000 ballots with erroneously marked return envelopes to voters in Brooklyn. The latest screw-up from the bipartisan board — whose members are appointed by local party leaders and approved by the City Council as one of the last vestiges of old-school machine politics — became an immediate talking point for Republicans.

Trump retweeted several stories Monday that referenced the snafu as part of his running attacks on mail-in voting, which is being used as a safe alternative for people looking to avoid crowds at polling stations. On Wednesday, he again cited the city’s ballot issues and urged people to go to the polls.

“Wow! 100,000 Mail In Ballots in New York City a total MESS. Mayor and Governor have no idea what to do,” the president tweeted. “Big Fraud, Unfixable! Cancel Ballots and go out and VOTE, just like in past decades, when there were no problems!”

His local supporters have followed suit.

“Time and time again, they single-handedly make the GOP’s case that mailed ballots are prone to errors and abuse, or that voter rolls are being purged, or that absentee ballots are sent in error,” City Council Member Joe Borelli said in a statement to POLITICO. “Some junior producers at Fox should send over pizzas for making their jobs so easy.”

Dean Kevlin, a Brooklyn resident who received a faulty ballot over the weekend, agreed.

“Trump is saying that election fraud is endemic and it’s everywhere, and this unfortunately plays to that view,” he said in an interview with POLITICO.

Kevlin said he spent the day Tuesday calling and visiting the Brooklyn offices of the Board of Elections and local politicians to resolve the issue. By the evening, the only assurance he’d received was that the matter was being looked into.

His whole family requested mail-in ballots and each received one containing an error: His wife’s return envelope bore his name, his was marked with the name of a neighborhood friend and his son’s had a name no one in the household recognized.

“The three of us — my son, my wife and I — and our next door neighbor decided that we would vote absentee because we didn’t want to stand in line for hours and hours and hours and risk getting Covid,” he said.

The screw-up has forced him to reconsider his plans.

“If it meant I’d die and it would stop Trump getting in, I might be willing to do it,” he said.

The executive director of the board, Michael Ryan, briefly addressed the controversy during a routine meeting Tuesday. He blamed a vendor for incorrectly printing the envelopes, and said new ballots would be sent to everyone affected.

“A lot of district leaders’ second cousin’s idiot sons are given jobs at the Board of Elections,” said an election expert who spoke with POLITICO on background. “They want to do something for them and they hope they won’t do too much damage — but now we are seeing what kind of damage they can do.”

The mix-up drew condemnation from a slate of New York officials.

“It’s appalling,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “I don’t know how many times we’re going to see the same thing happen at the Board of Elections and be surprised.”

And at a press conference in Albany, an aide to the governor, Melissa DeRosa said, “to say that we’re troubled by this is the understatement of the year.”

The board’s most egregious offense in recent memory was purging around 200,000 New Yorkers from the voter rolls during the 2016 election, prompting a lawsuit from then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

As recently as June, the board was fending off heavy criticism for failing to send out absentee ballots in time for voters to actually use them and then taking weeks to tally the results of several races.

Frustration with the board dates back decades: Mike Bloomberg, who was mayor from 2002 through 2013, often waged war with the board and attempted to undo partisan municipal elections entirely.

“Everyone I talked to kept saying, ‘What is this? What is this, a third-world country?’” the former mayor and brief 2020 presidential candidate said after waiting in line 40 minutes to vote in 2012. “It’s just a nightmare.”

Susan Lerner, of the good government group Common Cause New York, said the president is misrepresenting the issue at stake. Rather than providing an opportunity to cast extra votes for his opponent Joe Biden — as the president has claimed mail-in voting would do — the mix-up in Brooklyn would have the opposite effect by bringing vote totals down if it is not remedied.

“Not only is the info being used in a negative way, it is being misused,” she said. “The problem is not what the White House is making it out to be.”

The sanctity of mail-in ballots is not the only uncertainty facing New York City voters ahead of the momentous presidential election in November. The board hasn’t even instructed voters on how much postage to use for sending their ballots in, according to city and state officials. And last week, Ryan indicated a final count of all the votes may not come until well into December.

“Who is ultimately responsible for its construction and who can dismantle it and replace it with something better?” Staten Island Borough President Jimmy Oddo, a Republican, said of the board in an interview Tuesday. “That should be the sole focus.”

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from POLITICO can be found here ***