Posted by Doug Turetsky, June 19, 2012

Democracy may be priceless, but the cost of voting in New York City comes with an extra tab this year. That’s because next Tuesday’s Congressional primary will be the second of four citywide elections being held in 2012—the most in recent memory. It follows the Republican Presidential primary held in April. Still to come are the state legislative primaries on September 13 and the general election on November 6.

The price tag for each of these citywide elections: as much as $23 million.

We typically have three citywide elections in a year when the terms for state and federal officeholders are up for vote. But this year a federal judge ruled that New York State’s scheduling of its Congressional primaries in September, in conjunction with the state primaries for Assembly and Senate, would not leave enough time to get absentee ballots to military personnel overseas before the general election in November.

Albany officials could have shifted state legislative primaries to June 26 as well, but chose not to. With New York’s legislative session scheduled to run until June 21, the State Senate balked at the idea of holding an election just five days later that would leave them little time to get home and campaign. So counties across the state pony up more money to cover the cost of an additional day for voters to go to the polls. For the city this meant adding $23 million to the Board of Election’s budget. The funds cover expenditures such as printing ballots, transporting voting machines to the city’s more than 1,300 polling sites, and paying about 30,000 poll workers.

Although the city budget included $23.9 million for April’s Republican primary, actual expenditures totaled about $13.3 million according to information obtained by IBO’s Bernard O’Brien. The original allocation was made last year based on the assumption that both Republicans and Democrats would be holding primaries. But with only a primary for the city’s 486,000 registered Republicans taking place, the Board of Elections could cut some costs. By law every polling place had to open, but the elections board was able to combine some election districts within polling places. This allowed the board to reduce the number of voting machines needed to be delivered, ballots printed, and poll workers hired.

Despite the cost savings, the price per vote didn’t come cheap. Turnout in April was light, with 25,475 registered Republicans casting ballots, or about 5 percent of eligible voters. The cost per vote: about $522.

Turnout should be somewhat heavier in the upcoming elections, although that means there will likely not be as many opportunities for cost savings similar to those in the April 24^th election. So the total cost for the four elections this year may be upwards of $80 million.

That amount doesn’t include the cost of overtime for police officers stationed at voting sites. In 2008, when the city similarly had federal and state elections, police overtime cost an average of $500,000 for each of the three election days that year.

Nor does the $80 million include the cost of the special election in Brooklyn’s 27^th Senatorial District held in March. While the city budget originally included $840,000 for this election, the cost for the March election day was closer to $750,000. But the vote tallies for the two candidates were so close that it triggered a recount that is expected to bring the full cost significantly higher—for a district slated to disappear at the end of the year as new Senate lines go into effect in the wake of the 2010 Census and redistricting.

Posted by Doug Turetsky, October 27, 2010

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the Mayor’s Management Report released last month was how little notice it got. Among the city’s daily newspapers, just the Daily News gave it any ink, and that was a modest 145 words.

That’s a far cry from the not so distant past, when release of the Mayor’s Management Report was a full-scale press event, resulting in significant attention from legislators, civic organizations, and the general public. Long viewed as one of the major reports coming from City Hall and a public marker of Mayoral successes and failures, the report’s stature has clearly declined.

If size is any measure of prominence, compare this year’s volume of 226 pages (plus about 206 pages of definitions and 63 pages of additional tables available online) to the management report issued by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for fiscal year 1997: there was a 112-page summary volume, a 311-page volume of agency narratives, a 308-page volume of agency and citywide indicators, and a separate volume of more than 90 charts for the press. Based on a Nexis search, stories of 500 or more words appeared in The New York Times, Daily News, and Newsday the day after the report’s release that year.

Granted, such data avalanches can bury useful information under piles of less useful information, which can enable turning the Mayor’s Management Report into more of a public relations document than what it is supposed to be, a clear presentation of its hits and misses. Point readers to what you want them to see and leave it to others to have the energy or initiative to find numbers that might be less favorable.

To its credit, the Bloomberg Administration has sought to turn the management report into a more meaningful and accessible assessment of city government performance. An emphasis was placed on indicators reflecting outcomes. Unfortunately, much useful data was dropped from the report—information essential to understanding underlying trends.

Say, for example, you’re trying to determine if the trimmed down police force, which must now also devote a lot of its energy to counterterrorism, is able to respond fast enough to calls for help. The management report used to present response times to calls of crimes in progress by borough, now there’s only a citywide number, a figure not particularly helpful given the city’s geographic size, more than 300 square miles.

Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito has introduced legislation to restore another important piece of information no longer part of the Mayor’s Management Report: the number of radio runs the police make each year related to domestic violence. The report also used to routinely tell us how many arrests there were for violations of orders of protection. This is the kind of information that can be helpful in gauging the city’s efforts to combat domestic violence. So the relevant stats—the inputs necessary to understand the outcomes—should be part of the report, or at least made available as a regularly updated online supplement.

Making the management report matter again may also be an issue of timing. When the Mayor’s Management Report was instituted in the mid-1970s, the intention was to help inform budget decisions. That intent is no less important today. In the past IBO and others have suggested the management report be released in conjunction with the Mayor’s Executive Budget. Rather than fading into the bureaucratic morass, the Mayor’s Management Report should be an essential tool during budget deliberations.