De Blasio calls for probe of Phoenix Graphcs amid Brooklyn ballot uproar
The mishap at a Rochester printing plant that led to Brooklyn voters getting flawed ballot paperwork has prompted Mayor de Blasio and others to call for an investigation into the snafu.
De Blasio waded into the controversy Friday on the Brian Lehrer show after a caller questioned whether Phoenix Graphics, the Rochester-based firm responsible for printing the ballots, was being investigated based on its ties to the Republican Party.
“I think it should be investigated,” de Blasio said. “If the vendor might have had a motivation —because it seems awfully strange that something this big and this mistaken could happen — then there should be an investigation. What I will do is find out whether there is any way the city can do that even though we do not control the Board of Elections, or whether the state would have to do that investigation.”
The uproar over the ballots erupted earlier in the week as Brooklynites began reporting that the names on the absentee ballots that they received in the mail did not match the names on the return envelopes. As complaints rolled in, the city Board of Elections announced that it would resend the ballot packages to the approximately 100,000 voters who were affected.
De Blasio’s apparent motivation for a probe seemed to stem from the printer’s political ties — many of its employees are registered Republicans and the company has donated to GOP causes in the past.
But others pointed to a different rationale for the matter to receive more scrutiny.
Susan Greenhalgh, a senior advisor on election security at Free Speech For People, cited past balloting issues — like the Russian hack of VR Systems, a company that provides election software —as at first seeming potentially innocuous, but upon further examination taking on a much more serious hue.
“The vendor isn’t really qualified to know if they were hacked,” Greenhalgh said of Phoenix.
“There needs to be a meaningful investigation into what happened,” she added. “It should be done pronto. They need to get someone in and investigate right away.”
Greenhalgh has been monitoring election security for years and said that while the Brooklyn ballot snafu might well stem from a human or mechanical error on the printer’s end, it still bears further scrutiny, especially given attempts by Russians and other foreign governments to tamper with the presidential election.
Getting such a probe to occur is not as easy as it may seem, though.
Greenhalgh and a well-placed law enforcement source said that in cases like this, the vendor or the Board of Elections would have to request an investigation.
Greenhalgh said that creates a “catch-22” because vendors have little incentive to do so because it could hurt their business and boards might not want the scrutiny for a couple of reasons, protecting their own jobs and not wanting to erode confidence in the electoral process.
On Friday, New York City Board of Elections Director Michael Ryan said a “trap door” on one of the high-speed machines that processed the Brooklyn ballots malfunctioned when the ballots were being paired with their corresponding envelopes, causing the ballots to be coupled with the wrong envelopes.
But Ryan also said a subsequent software problem was identified as well.
“When they updated the software, all of the data that you could potentially have for forensic analysis of what went wrong was lost,” he said. “We don’t have an explanation other than ultimately human error for not appropriately going through these ballot envelopes and ensuring that the inside envelope matched the outside envelope once this problem was occurring.”
Phoenix did not return multiple requests for comment.
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