Nearly 100,000 Defective Absentee Ballots Sent to N.Y.C. Voters
A printing error has left voters scrambling for answers and could undermine their confidence in the New York City Board of Elections.
Nearly 100,000 New York City voters received defective absentee ballots, election officials acknowledged on Tuesday, a massive glitch that raised doubts about the city’s ability to handle a pandemic-era presidential election with millions of mail-in ballots expected.
The problems were mostly confined to Brooklyn, where voters registered outrage and confusion after seeing that their ballots had mismatched names and addresses on the outer and inner mail-back envelopes.
The faulty ballots come as President Trump has made repeated baseless challenges to the accuracy and integrity of mail-in voting; by Monday evening, Mr. Trump had shared four news articles on Twitter describing the absentee ballot issues in New York.
The problems in New York are yet another blemish for the New York City Board of Elections, which is run by a board of Democrats and Republicans, and has a long history of mismanaging elections.
Michael Ryan, the board’s executive director, blamed the problem on the board’s vendor, Phoenix Graphics, a commercial printing company based in Rochester, N.Y., which was hired to mail out ballots in Brooklyn and Queens.
Phoenix Graphics, a family-owned firm that prides itself on its “ability to deliver a high-quality product on time and within budget,” has worked with the city Board of Elections since at least 2010, according to city records, including during the June primaries. The company’s $4.6 million no-bid contract — which the board awarded under an emergency procurement in June — lasts through the end of the year.
Sal DeBiase, the company’s president and chief executive, did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/nyregion/absentee-ballot-nyc-brooklyn.html
smells like bullshit...
= new reply since forum marked as read
