The heads of two City Council committees are demanding Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new Democracy NYC office explain how it botched a mailing to 400,000 voters.
“These letters received significant media attention, but we were also contacted directly by New Yorkers who were confused after receiving them,” Bronx Councilmen Ritchie Torres and Fernando Cabrera wrote chief democracy officer Ayirini Fonseca-Sabune.
“… We share your goal of increasing voter turnout, but we believe issues of voter confusion require serious consideration as well. This is particularly true if such letters, or phone calls, are expected to become a regular practice.”
Torres, who chairs the Oversight and Investigations Committee, and Cabrera, who chairs the Government Operations Committee, then fired off a dozen questions.
Among them: How were the 400,000 voters selected to receive letters saying they had been placed on the “inactive” rolls?
City officials conceded this week that about 30,000 of the letters were sent in error.
Civis Analytics, the Chicago-based software vendor that assisted the city in the mailing, blamed the errors on how data it obtained from the Board of Elections was “filtered.”
“Was the list requested from the vendor a list of all inactive voters citywide or did it target any geographic region, political party affiliation, demographic group, or other subset of voters within the city?” the councilmen asked. “If not, did your outreach focus on any particular geographic region, party affiliation or demographic group?”
Raul Contreras, a mayoral spokesman, said “we’ll be responding to the letter and work with both council members to answer their questions.”
During his weekly appearance Friday on WNYC radio, de Blasio continued to spin the blunder by repeatedly highlighting that “92 percent” of the letters were delivered to people who were legitimately “inactive” voters.
He also said the effort to drum up voter participation was partly in response to the city Board of Elections’ mysterious 2016 purge of 200,000 voters from the rolls.
