NYC Board of Elections steps up training. Will that fix its record of dysfunction?
New York City's Board of Elections is more often criticized for its mistakes than praised for its successes.
In an effort to change that, the board on Tuesday certified 15 of its senior managers as professional elections administrators. The staff members will graduate with a certification offered by the nonpartisan Election Center, a nonprofit organization that has been training election staff across the country for three decades. Some of the board's most vocal critics heralded the move, while others argued that further structural reforms are still necessary.
"This is a significant step on the part of the New York City board to try and improve the election administration," said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York. Her organization has sued the city Board of Elections in the past, but she praised the new certification as a strategy to prevent administrative problems.
"Is that a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong again?" Lerner added. "Of course not."
For years, the New York City Board of Elections has faced major snafus around some of its highest-profile elections. In 2016, thousands of voters were improperly removed from the voter rolls ahead of the presidential primary. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency sent out more than 100,000 misprinted absentee ballot s. The same year, voters faced inordinately long wait times after the board disproportionately assigned voters to early voting poll sites.
Then in 2021, during the first citywide primary election using ranked-choice voting, the board released flawed preliminary results . The numbers included 135,000 sample ballots used to test the system ahead of the election — not cast by real voters.
"The reality is, when you have humans, you sometimes have human error," said Vincent Ignizio, deputy executive director of the city Board of Elections and one of the 15 staffers who were certified. He likened the training to the type of continuing education that lawyers complete to maintain their licenses.
The Election Center certification involved 12 courses, covering the history of elections, enhancing voter participation, election security and more. The 15 staff from the New York City Board of Elections, including nine Democrats and six Republicans, are the first and only elections staff in all of New York state to have completed it so far.
"The reality is, by an objective standard, we are the only certified elections administrators in the state," said Ignizio.
At least one official from each of the city's five county boards completed the training, along with several individuals from the agency's central office. The training was paid for as part of a four-year, $500,000 contract with the Election Center, which includes updating BOE manuals and poll worker training and materials.
Board staff said that by convening with elections administrators, they got a chance to exchange best practices with jurisdictions that are closer in size to New York City than some of the smaller counties in the rest of the state.
"It's very different. Onondaga [County] versus New York City, Steuben [County] versus New York City," said Georgea Kontzamanis, operations manager at the city Board of Elections. "It's a lot more helpful to be able to speak to people across the country, like a Miami Dade, like an L.A., who have to handle 5 million voters on any given election, just like we do."
After the mishap in the 2021 primary, Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie held a series of hearings across the state that were focused on how to improve the election experience for voters.
"A common theme from our hearings in 2021 was the need for greater professionalization and more training for election workers," said Myrie, who is now preparing to launch a primary challenge against Mayor Eric Adams. Myrie said there is still more to do, but he commended the agency for "investing in better administration of New York's elections."
Experts from NYU's Brennan Center for Justice released a report that same year calling for more reforms at the New York City Board of Elections, including additional training. Joanna Zdanys, deputy director of the elections and government program, called the new certifications, "the gold standard for election administration training."
"Of course, we've seen from their track record, the New York City Board of Elections still has much more to do to improve voter confidence, but it is encouraging to see them adopt this," she added.
Bart Haggerty, deputy chief clerk at the New York City Board of Elections office in Queens, said completing the certification process gave him a chance to take a step back and consider how to keep improving how elections are run.
"It has been a very challenging landscape for us in the last five years because of all the reforms that have been foisted upon us," he said, referring to changes the board had to implement on tight timetables under state and local laws, like the advent of early voting, early mail ballots and adoption of ranked-choice voting.
But he said the board's staff is working to move the agency in the right direction.
"I see the certification program as part of that effort," said Haggerty, "to move the board forward in a way perhaps it hasn't been moved forward before."
