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."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.