“One of the things we’ve pushed for at the BOE is to figure out a brand new way of closing these procedures to minimize the potential error that could arise,” said Commissioner J.C. Polanco at a BOE Commissioners’ meeting Tuesday afternoon.

“Unfortunately, the legislature didn’t move on any of those concerns,” he said.

The Board has been widely criticized for its handling of this primary and past elections, and State Sen. Adriano Espaillat is using vote-count errors and other reported “irregularities” from primary night as grounds for a legal challenge to the primary results, which his attorney Martin Connor filed in New York State Supreme Court today. A group called LatinoJustice is also asking the Department of Justice to investigate the Board of Elections’ handling of the primary.

Polanco deflected criticism that BOE was to blame for any of the reported problems, including stories of a shortage of bilingual poll-workers and voters turned away from polling sites, in addition to the uncounted ballots.

“What you saw that night was reporting done by the AP from numbers given to them by the NYPD,” Polanco said, adding that the NYPD was “not at all” to blame for what happened.

Polanco said the BOE was being unfairly maligned by the campaigns.

“I think its unfortunate. What’s happening is the campaigns are launching incredible vicious attacks to the hardworking men and women here at the board of elections,  and they’re based on absolutely nothing but a conspiracy theory,” he said.

“The reality is we have hardworking men and women here at the Board of Elections that are working tirelessly to make sure that each one of these ballots are counted,” he said.

Common Cause executive director Susan Lerner said the primary SNAFUs were “ par for the course.”

“This is an election where we only had a few primaries. Imagine how much worse this is going to be in September,” she said.

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Reporters swarm Espaillat campaign spokesman Ibrahim Khan outside Manhattan Supreme Court

At a hearing in State Supreme Court in lower Manhattan today, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat’s counsel Martin Connor announced the campaign’s intention to file a petition that could potentially pave the way for a do-over of last week’s Congressional primary election.

Espaillat lost to Rep. Charlie Rangel by what was initially reported as several thousand votes, but Rangel’s margin of victory is now about 2 percent, or 802 votes. The Espaillat campaign is hoping that voter complaints about irregularities at polling places and the existence of roughly 2,000 uncounted affidavit ballots could reverse the election’s outcome.

On Friday, Connor filed a petition against Rangel, the New York Police Department and the City Board of Elections asking the Court to watch over the counting of outstanding votes, a process that is not scheduled to begin until Thursday.

The new petition, which the campaign intends to file tomorrow, will include another statute covering “irregularities” in the primary process. If a judge does find evidence of irregularities, it could give Espaillat grounds to ask for a new primary election, said campaign spokesman Ibrahim Khan.

“The petition allows you to file for the election to be redone,” Khan said. “Today was about preserving all of our legal options.”

Initial reports from the BOE on primary night showed Rangel winning the race by roughly 2,000 votes out of more than 40,000 cast, but by last week’s end, an error that left votes from 79 of the 506 district precincts unaccounted for lowered the Board’s accounting of Rangel’s victory margin to 800 votes.

Rangel campaign manager Moises Perez would not comment on the reports of problems from primary night, including voters’ complaints about a lack of available bilingual poll-workers to help Spanish speaking voters.

To read the full article at City & State click here.