On WOR this morning, Mayor Bloomberg once again bashed the Board of Elections for using an antiquated system to count votes and taking a week to give citizens an accurate vote count from Tuesday's primary.
"Once again, the Board of Elections just is not able to give the public the easy guaranteed reliable ways to vote,” Bloomberg told host John Gambling. He also compared the Board of Elections to the "Keystone Cops."
In an interview with Gothamist however, Michael Ryan, the Executive Director of the Board of Elections, thanked the Bloomberg administration for their assistance. "I would like to praise the Bloomberg administration for helping us out. Over all, they have been very helpful, and the spirit of inter-department cooperation has been very good," Ryan told us.
Ryan explained how the BOE is still collecting voting machines from across the city (he said congestion in the city has slowed the process), and will begin counting the votes from the machines today, with a non-official release of a vote count coming this Monday.
"In terms of collecting the vote, we are following state law. The closeness of a possible runoff has no bearing on our speed or what we're doing," Ryan said.
When asked about reports of voter fraud in South Wiliamsburg, Ryan explained that the BOE only "sticks to our business of counting votes and not prosecuting anyone. That's up to law enforcement."
Bill Thompson, who finished second to Bill de Blasio, and has been eagerly waiting on the official vote count, will have to decide by midnight tonight whether to proceed with a runoff—that is, before he has any idea of how many votes he received.
"Sometimes the statues don't square up with the process," Ryan told us. "But that's not the BOE's decision to make."
