BY SARAH FERGUSON | Voting rights activists and members of the New York City Council are inquiring as to why the certified results of the April 19 presidential primary were missing from the city Board of Elections’ Web site for at least 36 hours before being reposted again this afternoon.
The official results for the New York primary were certified and posted online on Fri., May 6.
But this Tuesday night, voting rights activists, who have been monitoring the B.O.E. data closely, noted that the results for the presidential primary were no longer posted on the Web site.
A screenshot taken from Tuesday night shows the Web page where the “Election Results Summary” is supposed to be posted. The page shows certified results for two categories: a Feb. 23 special election for a City Council seat in the Bronx and the April 19 special election to fill Assembly seats in the 65th Assembly District on the Lower East Side (Sheldon Silver’s old seat); the 59th Assembly District in Brooklyn; and the 62nd Assembly District in Queens.
But the results of the hotly contested April 19 Democratic presidential primary do not appear.
All those results were taken offline without notice until Thursday afternoon at around 1 p.m., when they reappeared again on the B.O.E. Web site without explanation.
The New York City Board of Elections has not responded to The Villager’s requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Councilmember Ben Kallos, who chairs the Governmental Operations Committee, which has oversight over the B.O.E., said Kallos is looking into the matter.
One source said the B.O.E. routinely recertifies the results of elections, as they did numerous times in 2012 and 2013 after Hurricane Sandy, when some ballots from the presidential election that went missing were later accounted for.
But if that is the case, a notice that the results have been changed and recertified should be posted.
Another explanation could be routine maintenance, though 36 hours is a long time — especially when the B.O.E. is under investigation by the state Attorney General and New York City comptroller over its botched performance during the April 19 primary.
Kallos and other members of the City Council are now probing how 117,000 voters were purged from the voting rolls prior to the April 19 primary and some 120,000 were forced to vote by affidavit citywide on primary day because their names were missing from poll sites or they found their party status had been dropped or switched without their knowing.
