NYC Board of Elections glitch reveals how Mayor de Blasio’s son voted in city’s primary election
Like father, unlike son.
Dante de Blasio ranked Maya Wiley — a high-profile critic of his father — as his top choice for New York City mayor in this summer’s Democratic primary, according to a new study that exposes a glaring flaw in the Board of Elections’ reporting methods.
The 24-year-old son of Mayor de Blasio was among 378 New Yorkers whose voting choices in the June 22 primary were contained in a study released Monday by Princeton University’s Electoral Innovation Lab.
Researchers with the Princeton lab were able to track down the results — which are supposed to be confidential — by cross-referencing state voter files against precinct-level results from election districts where only one voter is registered.
Dante de Blasio, the sole voter registered at Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence on the Upper East Side, confirmed he selected Wiley as his top pick in what marked the city’s first-ever ranked-choice election.
The de Blasio son also took withering aim at the Elections Board, which has a long and embarrassing history of messing up elections in the Big Apple.
“I am appalled by this violation of my privacy,” he said in a statement provided by City Hall. “My main concern is not that people will know who I voted for, but rather that the BOE 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 BOE’s blatant carelessness. Enough is enough.”
After Wiley, Dante de Blasio ranked Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams as his second choice, followed by former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, businessman Raymond McGuire and former federal housing secretary Shaun Donovan, according to the Princeton report.
Wiley, a former counsel to de Blasio, became a fierce critic of the mayor after leaving his administration in 2017. Running on a left-wing platform, she often railed against de Blasio on the mayoral campaign trail, professing that there’s “a crisis of confidence” in his administration.
A spokesman for Wiley declined to comment on Dante de Blasio’s primary ballot.
Mayor de Blasio, who’s registered to vote at his Park Slope, Brooklyn, residence, has not revealed his choices in the primary.
However, Hizzoner privately offered support for Adams before his primary win, according to reports. The mayor also endorsed Adams after his victory and has praised him as a formidable candidate to succeed him when he leaves office in January.
Elections Board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez-Diaz claimed the voter data breach wasn’t her agency’s fault because city law requires the board to report results on a precinct level.
“The manner in which election results are reported is legally mandated,” Vazquez-Diaz said.
But a City Hall spokesman called bull on the Board of Elections defense and blasted the panel as “boneheaded and careless.”
“They are giving a strict interpretation of one line of the City Charter while ignoring state law that prohibits ballots being revealed in this way,” the spokesman said. “They aren’t following the law. They are just displaying, yet again, a basic misunderstanding of the fundamental spirit of voting laws.”
Monday’s voter data breach wasn’t the Election Board’s first voter snafu in this past election cycle.
The board accidentally released preliminary results from the June mayoral race that included 135,000 fake “test” ballots that staff had forgotten to remove from the tabulation system before running the count. Several hours after dropping the incorrect results, the board withdrew them, apologized and then released corrected tabulations the next day.
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