City's vote-counting process a slow one

In a city known for its fast pace, getting results on election night can be maddeningly slow.

Finding out the unofficial results after New York City's polls close can require plenty of patience, thanks to a paper-and-scissors, multiple-person process the city Board of Elections says it must, by state law, follow for vote tabulating and reporting.

It's a process that election watchers dealt with on March 20, when it took hours after the polls closed before it was clear a special election for a state Senate seat would be too close to call, and would have to be settled by counting absentee ballots.

And they'll have to deal with it up to four times in the coming months: The Republican presidential primary set for later this month, the congressional primary scheduled for June, the state Legislature primary that's planned for September, and the general election in November.

"You throw up your hands in despair, not only at the Board of Elections but at some of the byzantine election law that hasn't been updated, that leaves us with 21st-century technology and 20th-century vote-counting regulations," said Neal Rosenstein, elections specialist at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Here's how it works: Voters go to their poll sites and fill out their ballots by hand. The ballots are fed into the scanning machines. When the polls close, the scanners print out paper tapes, similar to the ones found in grocery stores.

The tapes show the results from that particular scanning machine, broken down by the different candidates. Those tapes are cut up, and the pieces divided up by election district.

Poll workers then take the strips of paper and add up the totals, then write them down on canvassing sheets. Police officers take the sheets to the precincts, then enter the totals into a computer that are then reported electronically as the unofficial election returns to media outlets who use them to call races.

New York City's Board of Elections, which is not under the city government's control, says it's bound by state law to do it this way. General Counsel Steven Richman said the board understood the frustrations.

Richman said the board in February had proposed some revisions. Of course, implementing a system like that would require the funds to set it up.