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.
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."
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.