Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Some NYC voters' ballot choices revealed by officials' latest error

Bill and Dante de Blasio

Dante de Blasio (right), son of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, was among the voters whose ballot choices were revealed by the Board of Elections' mistake.

NDZ/Star Max/Getty Images

Ballot secrecy is a right every voter is supposed to be afforded. But for hundreds of New York City voters, including the mayor's son, their privacy was violated — further tarnishing the Board of Election' already damaged reputation.

Researchers at Princeton University's Electoral Innovation Lab and the Stevens Institute of Technology found that mistakes made by the New York City Board of Elections allowed them to inadvertently determine the ballot choices of 378 voters in the June mayoral primary. Their post-election analysis was released Monday.

While this is a small fraction of the 1 million votes cast overall, the error raises a major privacy concern and violates the New York Voter Bill of Rights secret-ballot provision. It's also another example in a long list of blunders made by the city's Board of Elections.


The New York City Board of Elections is required by law to release the vote records after each election, which lists the ballot choices made by a voter as well as the voter's precinct. To anonymize the voter records, an additional step is taken to associate the vote records with numerical identifiers rather than the voter's name.

Precincts with only a few voters are typically bundled with another larger precinct. However, for this year's primaries that step was not taken. This meant that in precincts consisting of only one voter, that person's ballot choices could be matched up with the voter rolls, leading to their identification.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Jesse Clark, a postdoctoral researcher at the Electoral Innovation Lab, Lindsey Cormack, a political science professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and Sam Wang, director of the Electoral Innovation Lab, discovered that misstep made it possible to identify 378 voters.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's son, Dante, was among the voters identified through the researchers' post-election analysis, along with former Deputy Mayor Robert Steel.

"I am appalled by this violation of my privacy," Dante de Blasio, a registered Democrat, told The New York Times. "My main concern is not that people will know who I voted for, but rather that the B.O.E. has repeatedly shown complete incompetence and still hasn't been reformed by the state. Hundreds of my fellow voters have had their right to a private ballot violated by the B.O.E.'s blatant carelessness. Enough is enough."

This privacy issue is the most recent mishap caused by the city's election officials. In June, following the mayoral primaries, the Board of Elections accidentally included 135,000 test ballots in an official vote tally. Ahead of the November general election, nearly 100,000 voters were mailed absentee ballots with incorrect names and return addresses. And last year's races were also plagued with numerous problems that resulted in extremely long vote-counting delays.

A spokesperson for the Board of Elections told The New York Times that the manner in which the voter records were reported is legally mandated.

To prevent another privacy violation, the researchers said an easy fix would be to return to the past practice of lumping single-voter precincts in with larger ones so that it's no longer possible to identify individual voters. However, election officials say that method was not legally permissible and would require a change to the city charter.

"It is our hope that by raising this issue we may better protect the privacy of voters in New York City in a way that preserves important access to election data," the researchers' report concluded. "These two interests — voter privacy and data transparency — do not have to come into conflict. By allowing re-aggregation of small precincts, neither principle would have to be sacrificed."

Read More

The Fragile Ceasefire in Gaza

A view of destruction as Palestinians, who returned to the city following the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, struggle to survive among ruins of destroyed buildings during cold weather in Jabalia, Gaza on January 23, 2025.

Getty Images / Anadolu

The Fragile Ceasefire in Gaza

Ceasefire agreements are like modern constitutions. They are fragile, loaded with idealistic promises, and too easily ignored. Both are also crucial to the realization of long-term regional peace. Indeed, ceasefires prevent the violence that is frequently the fuel for instability, while constitutions provide the structure and the guardrails that are equally vital to regional harmony.

More than ever, we need both right now in the Middle East.

Keep ReadingShow less
Money Makes the World Go Round Roundtable

The Committee on House Administration meets on the 15th anniversary of the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United v. FEC.

Medill News Service / Samanta Habashy

Money Makes the World Go Round Roundtable

WASHINGTON – On the 15th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and one day after President Trump’s inauguration, House Democrats made one thing certain: money determines politics, not the other way around.

“One of the terrible things about Citizens United is people feel that they're powerless, that they have no hope,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Ma.).

Keep ReadingShow less
Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

The United States Supreme Court.

Getty Images / Rudy Sulgan

Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then, Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, and many national reform and good government groups, have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system because the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).

Now, three minor political parties, who opposed the reform from the start and have unsuccessfully sued previously, are once again trying to overturn it. The Peace and Freedom Party, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party have teamed up to file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Their brief repeats the same argument that the courts have previously rejected—that the top-two system discriminates against parties and deprives voters of choice by not guaranteeing every party a place on the November ballot.

Keep ReadingShow less
Independents as peacemakers

Group of people waving small American flags at sunset.

Getty Images//Simpleimages

Independents as peacemakers

In the years ahead, independents, as candidates and as citizens, should emerge as peacemakers. Even with a new administration in Washington, independents must work on a long-term strategy for themselves and for the country.

The peacemaker model stands in stark contrast to what might be called the marriage counselor model. Independent voters, on the marriage counselor model, could elect independent candidates for office or convince elected politicians to become independents in order to secure the leverage needed to force the parties to compromise with each other. On this model, independents, say six in the Senate, would be like marriage counselors because their chief function would be to put pressure on both parties to make deals, especially when it comes to major policy bills that require 60 votes in the Senate.

Keep ReadingShow less