City to Create Unit to Investigate Corruption, Waste at Election Board

This article was written by C. Zawadi Morris.

Long criticized for its slowness, mismanagement and errors in vote counting, the Board of Elections will be receiving a new oversight unit soon - courtesy of the city’s Department of Investigation - to scrutinize and punish fraud, waste and corruption at the board, The New York Times reports.   

The new muckraking unit is expected to be operational by September 2014 and will also have subpoena power if it finds evidence of criminality.   

The Department of Investigation said earlier this month it found the BOE had wasted $2.4 million in city funds by overstaffing poll sites for an off-year election in November 2011, during which roughly 90 percent of poll sites had 10 or fewer voters per poll worker.   

“You can’t have a more dysfunctional organization than we have now,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg of the Board of Elections. “It certainly can’t hurt.”