Researchers from Princeton University and Stevens Institute of Technology say the New York City Board of Elections failed to protect the privacy of voters in the June 2021 primary, citing an alarming 378 instances where a voter could be matched to what is supposed to be a secret ballot. One of those voters was identified as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s son: Dante de Blasio, the only person to cast a ballot in the election district that includes Gracie Mansion.
In the Democratic mayoral primary, he ranked from first to fifth: Maya Wiley, Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, Ray McGuire and Shaun Donovan, according to a report released Monday.
The younger de Blasio said he was, “appalled by this violation of my privacy." adding, “My main concern is not that people will know who I voted for, but rather that the BOE has repeatedly shown complete incompetence and still hasn’t been reformed by the State."
The researchers were able to identify his choices by comparing two publicly available data sets. They used the cast vote record, which captures a voters’ ranked selections in the Democratic or Republican primary by assembly and election district, to the New York State voter history file from August 2021. It includes a person’s name, address, and election district, along with additional information like voter history, party affiliation and registration status.
“We were able to identify with a fairly high level of certainty that this person, who was the only person who’s marked as voting in that precinct voted with the only ballot that was recorded as cast in that precinct,” said Jesse Clark, a postdoctoral research associate at the Electoral Innovation Lab at Princeton University and co-author of the report, explaining how he and his colleagues were able to identify how these 378 voters cast their ballots. “That’s a glaring privacy issue,” he added.
But Clark and his co-authors said it’s also a problem that’s easily fixable. They recommend the city BOE take any single voter precinct and combine it with a nearby precinct with more voters and suddenly you would not be able to match the voter with their ballot selections.
Of the 378 instances where a single voter cast a ballot in a single precinct, there were 370 Republican voters and 8 Democratic. Democratic voters far outnumber Republicans, which would also make them less likely to be the only voter in a specific election district.
The researchers first raised the issue with the city BOE on September 13th in a telephone conversation with their general counsel and a bipartisan team. The researchers note they stressed that failure to protect voters' privacy violates state election law. Officials from the city BOE said they were aware of the issue, but insisted they could not address the problem without a change to the language in the New York City Charter.
On Monday, city BOE spokeswoman Valerie Vasquez Diaz cited a separate section of the state’s voluminous election law and wrote simply, “The manner in which election results are reported is legally mandated.”
Combining data from election districts is not a new phenomenon. The report states that before 2021, if too few voters cast ballots in a specific district, the record of those results was bundled with another election district. That appears to be the case even as recently as the special election on February 2nd, 2021, according to certified election results the city BOE posted online which show election districts that were combined together.
These types of inconsistencies between what the city BOE says and what it does are likely to be among the concerns raised at a state Senate hearing on Tuesday focused on how to improve the voting experience across New York State. Representatives from the New York City and State Boards of Elections are expected to testify, along with other civil and voting rights groups including the Brennan Center for Justice which recently issued its own report about the structural problems with the city BOE.
Researchers from Princeton and Stevens are not scheduled to testify at the hearing. They said the timing of their report’s release was coincidental. Clark, one of the report’s authors, also stressed this issue is unrelated to ranked-choice voting. He said no matter what type of voting system the city used, if they continue to report results for single-voter election districts, a voter’s privacy is at risk.
For Dante de Blasio—one of nearly a million voters who turned out for the primary, and one of hundreds whose election choices were exposed—he said he hopes the state takes the issue of reforming the BOE seriously so that more voters don’t end up in his situation.
“Hundreds of my fellow voters have had their right to a private ballot violated by the BOE’s blatant carelessness,” he said. “Enough is enough.”
