The New York City Board of Elections may insist every vote counts — but Tuesday, the oft-criticized agency admitted that not every vote has yet been counted in the 2012 general election. BOE workers recently unearthed more than 400 votes cast — but never tabulated — in the Hurricane Sandy-disrupted November election, Board President Frederic Umane confirmed at the board’s weekly meeting. The revelation means the city will have to update and certify the results of the 2012 vote yet again. “Doesn’t certification of the election ever finally end? Do they ever get to a final total?” Alan Flacks, a BOE gadfly who raised the issue before the commissioners Tuesday, said after the meeting. “They want to assure every voter — because of scandals in the past where ballots were not counted — that your vote is always counted,” Flacks told the Daily News. “I brought it up because I was upset that I found out that they discovered more uncounted ballots.”
The votes were discovered by workers in the Manhattan borough office of the BOE in the past few days, Umane said. The vast majority of the untallied paper ballots — 401, most of them affidavits, as you can see listed in the chart above — have been identified as having been cast by Manhattan voters.
Umane told the News some of the ballots — about 40 or 50 from a single polling place — were found mingled with unused forms in a folder opened by BOE workers as they cleaned up paperwork from the the 2012 general election.
The remaining smattering of the “mushroom ballots,” as BOE insiders call votes that “emerge from the darkness” after it’s presumed everything’s been tallied, were cast by people registered outside New York County.
Full Article: NYC Board Of Elections Workers Unearth Hundreds Of Uncounted 2012 Ballots | New York Daily News.