Hours after Mayor de Blasio tried to downplay the city’s botched mailing notifying voters they had been placed in the “inactive” file, his administration conceded that 30,000 of the letters were sent in error.
At a press conference Thursday, the mayor said the key point in the whole fiasco was that “very few — some, but very few” of the 400,000 letters sent out by his new Democracy NYC office “were inaccurate.”
The city warned voters in the letter that they had been placed on the inactive roll and might have a problem casting a ballot on Election Day, Nov. 6.
But many people who got the letter complained they are regular voters and couldn’t understand what was going on.
City Hall spokesman Raul Contreras later said that 30,000 of the letters shouldn’t have been mailed in the first place, while claiming that represented a “small portion” of the entire mailing.
He further tried to spin the boondoggle, saying “people calling the Board of Elections to double check their status, or to fix their address so they can vote, are both good things. Who is at fault for the small error that occurred is not clear, but we’re taking responsibility for it.”
But Civis Analytic, the Chicago-based software vendor the city used to edit the mailing list, admitted that “the error lies not in the data itself — but in the way the list was filtered from the original dataset.
“List creation using complex datasets is a difficult, time-consuming task, and as data scientists we recognize this as an understandable human error,” the company added.
The botched mailing cost taxpayers $200,000.
City officials have previously said Civis pulled voting data from the state Board of Elections and then “scrubbed” those records to create a more “accurate” list of “inactive” voters.
Meanwhile, even more questions about the process surfaced.
John Conklin, a spokesman for the state elections board, told The Post his office checked its records over the past two years and found no requests from the de Blasio administration or Civis for a list of inactive voters.
