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State, City Council to investigate Election Day screwups in Boston, from running out of ballots to one polling place going without lights
By adamg on Wed, 11/06/2024 - 3:13pm
Louijeune calling for a hearing and soon.
Both Secretary of State William Galvin and the Boston City Council decided today to investigate how precincts across the city ran out of ballots and numerous other ways voters had obstacles placed in the way of casting their ballots, from one polling place not having any working lights to voters with disabilities being refused access to handicap parking spaces at another.
"Our democracy is increasingly fragile in so many ways" and the last thing Boston needs is another election where people have trouble voting, Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said, calling for an emergency hearing on what went wrong.
"It's unacceptable," Councilor Ed Flynn (South Boston, South End, Chinatown, Downtown) said. Flynn went further than his fellow councilors in calling for a federal civil-rights investigation, in particular about the way he said voters with disabilities had problems yesterday.
Flynn, like other councilors, had only praise for poll workers, who they said did the absolute best they could under trying conditions. Instead, he and other councilors said they would grill city Election Department officials on what went wrong.
Flynn said not only had Galvin warned the city on Monday to expect higher than average turnout, as precincts began to run out of ballots, poll workers couldn't get anybody at the Elections Department in City Hall to answer their increasingly frantic calls.
Boston Police officers were eventually dispatched from City Hall with more ballots, starting at 6 p.m., in rush hour. Flynn said new ballots didn't get to one Savin Hill polling station until 7:45 p.m.
City Councilor Liz Breadon, who represents Allston and Brighton, said she got a call from a friend working the polls on Pond Street in Jamaica Plain that she and other poll workers realized by 2 p.m. that they would be running out of ballots.
Her friend, she said, called her around 5 p.m. because they couldn't get anybody at City Hall to answer their calls. "She was frantic, anticipating a big rush" between 5 and 8 p.m., she said.
Councilor Enrique Pepén (Hyde Park, Mattapan, Roslindale) said one precinct at Another Course to College in Hyde Park ran out of ballots. He said he and state Rep. Russell Holmes, later joined by Councilor Julia Mejia, tried to convince voters to stay in line, that more ballots were on the way.
A polling place at Cristo Rey School in Dorchester also ran out of ballots. Councilors said at least one Charlestown polling place also ran out of ballots.
One precinct at the Bates School in Roslindale ran out of ballots shortly after 5 p.m.
But missing ballots weren't the only issue.
Flynn said when he and his wife went to the Cathedral School with some pizza for poll workers, they were shocked to see the place had no lights on. Some enterprising poll workers who lived nearby went home to get table lamps; later in the evening, people pulled out their phones to get some light to read ballots.
Councilor Erin Murphy (at large), said that the day started with a busted tabulating machine at Florian Hall in Dorchester. And she said one constituent called her to let her know that some people with disabled family members were turned away from handicap spots at the Conley School in Roslindale by a principal who said the spaces were contractually available only to teachers during the school day.
Mejia said that at the Frederick Pilot School in Dorchester, confusion reigned because of a large influx of Spanish, Haitian and Cape Verdean Creole-speaking residents without enough poll workers to help them. Some were not allowed to vote without showing licenses, she said.
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Comments
Of course City Hall didn't respond
"We don't have to care, we're the phone company."
Why would they ever run out
Why would they ever run out of ballots? They know how many registered voters there are. Do they skimp on ballots assuming some voters won't show up?
I mean, "some voters" definitely won't show up. That's a thing.
Voter turnout is always well below the number of registered voters. I think it's reasonable to assume they won't all show up. The problem here is that they cut it too close.
What did this even save?
What's the cost per ballot? Let's use a conservative estimate of 10 cents.
There were 431,956 registered voters in Boston in 2020. That comes out to about $43k to print ballots for everyone.
How many people did they assume would no-show? There were 43,775 inactive voters that year. So if they assume only active voters will show up, they're saving about $4400. That's ridiculous for the amount of grief and wasted time this caused, and is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the costs of running an election. Just print 100% and be done with it.
Even if forecast turnout is
Even if forecast turnout is lower than some previous election, they need many more ballots for it.
Besides having enough at the official polling place on actual election day, they need to have enough of every possible ballot at each early voting location.
That's something that wasn't a factor not too many cycles ago.
Many issues
The call-in lines poll workers use to get advise or help were crashing all day because they cannot handle the volume. There was a lot of wait time for a call to be answered A couple of the lines dedicated to specific issues that may arise were going to a voice mail box. At one point one of the main lines issued a recording stating that it was no longer in service. This was not a city election department issue but one associated with the provided phone service.
When lost voters would need assistance to find where they should be voting, a poll worker can phone-in to get that data but most answering only had city data at their disposal and if that person might be registered outside of Boston the election worker had to "wait in line" to get to the computer that could access that data.
One of the problems was that one or more internet sites including sites brought up by Google search were sending people to the wrong location, and that was because the data was never updated to reflect the redistricting that occurred a couple of years ago,. Most are or were click bait sites that thrive on click advertising and never update their content. There are still web sites that direct people to the RMV in Roslindale that hasn't been there since 2020.
As to showing IDs, that was happening citywide because many of the voters that never vote, other than at a presidential elections, had failed to send back the annual city census that keeps them active on the voter roster, and so they scrolled to an "Inactive" status requiring the display of an ID to validate the person was still living there and qualified to vote. Almost all precincts were doing that as people who do not vote with regularity were coming out of the woodwork. In such a case an ID display is required but may include some alternate form to link you with your residential address such as a bank statement, auto registration, utility bill, pay stub, or W2. There are others as well.
If they were requiring people to show ID just to vote otherwise (which is not clear here from the content), they need to be replaced. All poll workers take annual training, sometimes 2 times a year, to review what they can and cannot do. One is to force someone to show ID just to vote. Regardless of your personal feelings, that is the current law, and the people that work the polls are not the people that fix that. Yet a lot of poll workers are yelled at, berated, and people engage in arguments holding things up. Get a life people and take that to your state rap and stop using innocent poll workers to take out your hatred.
Running out of ballots might have been prevented if enough were sent that morning but also if the working staff at those sites knew the room. I am aware of one precinct that made that call early in the day and had 2 deliveries of blank ballots, and on time, so they never ran out. Savvy people.
As to the parking issue at the Conley School, various city departments have issues with BPS which is quasi independent in many areas. In theory that is school property and not election day property so they could ban everyone other than teachers from that site. Courtesy might have been a consideration of course. Those community centers that share space with BPS are often at odds with BPS for space and access time. So much so that the community centers people are looking at ways to get out of BPS buildings as quick as possible so their programs can thrive and not be under the BPS thumb.
And the sad fact is that polling locations are guests in those buildings, and many buildings take on the usage as a polling location somewhat begrudgingly. Elections are not often welcome even when it is a city-owned building but a different department.
It's not a perfect system but this year things were not ready, and some buildings were not in a state of good repair either. The Election people are just guests and have no control of broken lights or similar.
Designated handicapped spots for voters
Each polling place, be it a school, library, or another building, should have designated handicapped parking spots for voter. The employees at the building should have their spots and they should be different from the voters’ spots
Conley School
Was the school even open? And if so, WHY?
BPS doesn't close schools for
BPS doesn't close schools for election day, even when their buildings are used to host elections.
Fortunately the weather was nice and the students at my school were able to have PE outside since the gym was in use by the election department.
BPS Mafia Strikes Again!
Will someone please hold them accountable!
If they had a handicap placard
If they had a handicapped placard they should have just parked there regardless of what was said to them.
Would you, if someone with
Would you, if someone with authority told you they'd have you towed?
Absentee Ballots
My daughter requested in September for her absentee ballot get sent to her at uni in NYC. The city sent it on October 15th and again on October 25th. She never got it. She took the train home yesterday morning, voted, turn took the train back to NYC a few hours later. Nearly 10 hours of travel time because USPS sucks.
Same with my son in college
Same with my son in college in CT; ended up bringing him a new ballot on parents weekend in Oct and hand delivering it to our city hall (Malden, not Boston)
Well done Wu.
The Mayor’s staff really displaying some professional competence here.
Be careful. We are stuck with
Be careful. We are stuck with this staff for another 4 years.
wat
The department doesn't turn over with every new mayor, and even if it did, Wu has 1 year left not 4.
West Roxbury 20-16
I worked at the Joyce Kilmer lower school, ward 20 pct 16. We were out of ballots for half an hour, with over a hundred ppl in line. Last voter was something like 8:29, last ballot cast (from the mail-in ballots) was probably 9:15. It was a long, always busy day anyway, but just watching those last ballot piles go down with no idea when new ones were coming, that sucked. Everyone in line was super cool about it, thankfully.
Everyone we talked to at the election dept knew by mid to late afternoon that we were gonna need more ballots, it's just we never had any idea when they were gonna come. Finding out today that nobody was getting extra ballots before 6 pm because none were sent out yet, that's just f'ed up.
This should have been triple
This should have been triple checked. Work ethic is hard to find these days. When was the last time electrical work was inspected? My deceased husband received a ballot but I didn't. Don't they cross check with death certificates in the Vital Records Dept?? Save your condolences. Just fix it.
See, this is an obvious tall tale.
For this to be true, we'd have to believe that you submitted the form for a mail-in ballot, and someone also did so for your dead husband, including signing the name, the ballot being sent to your house, but you never getting a ballot. Nobody just "receives" a ballot, alive or dead. Get out of here with this nonsense. Of all the issues, dead people getting mail-in ballots ain't one of them.
Maybe their husband received
Maybe their husband received the mail-in ballot application, but they didn't.
Do you always lie for attention?
Nobody automatically gets a ballot in the mail. In the Summer elections depts send out notice of how to apply for a mail ballot. If one follows up, sends that all in, and requests both primary and general election ballots, they are sent to the registered voter at the appropriate time.
I've been voting in Boston
I've been voting in Boston for over 25 years and have never been asked to show my driver's license. Is that requirement only for non-English speaking voters? Is there a translation service available for poll works to communicate with constituents?