Mayor and Council Speaker Criticize Elections Board

New York Times, By JENNIFER STEINHAUER, November 4, 2004

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stepped up criticism yesterday of the Board of Elections for its performance on Tuesday, and his complaints were echoed by the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, who said the Council would hold oversight hearings over the board's practices.

On a day of heavy turnout at the polls, phones at the board's office went unanswered, information on where to vote was hard to obtain and broken voting machines and befuddled workers greeted many voters, some of whom stood in line for nearly two hours at polls around the city. The New York Public Interest Group logged more than 3,000 phone calls on its hot line from voters who had experienced problems.

Advertisement
Advertise on NYTimes.com

"We are concerned about the fact that our system was overstressed yesterday and was not able to handle the tremendous influx of voters," Mr. Miller said during a news conference on the steps of City Hall. "All across this city, voters were frustrated in their attempts to vote yesterday for reasons that are not clear to me and that aren't really legitimate."

He said that his office placed 300 calls to the board's hot line on Tuesday and that only 21 of them were answered. Further, while Mr. Miller conceded that the Council had not heeded the pleas of the board for more money to train and pay workers, he said the Bloomberg administration was even less open to allocating more to the board's budget.

Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday that he was unsympathetic to the board's inability to handle its high phone volume, comparing its performance to "restaurants that complain that the service is slow because it's mealtime."

"I don't have a lot of sympathy for that," he said at a news conference in Queens. "Of course, the Board of Elections had their phone lines busy at election time, and I think they should have prepared for it."

John Ravitz, the executive director of the board, said yesterday that while the board was understaffed on its phone lines and had faced sporadic problems at the polling stations, he was proud of its work.

"I have heard comments that we didn't have a good day or we weren't prepared but I thought we had a great day," he said. "We got an additional 400 machines out and we hired additional workers. At no point did voters have to be turned away. We got 435,000 new voters this year. We got through it."