Tom Suozzi and Teresa Butlter proudly

present don't sweat the small stuff and run again. Fired for not wringing the door bells for Tom Suozzi, Teresa Butler sues in federal court and obtains a cash stuffing in exchange for the radioactive documents  secreted under the Protective Order of the federal court. 

Surely the NYC Board of Elections modelled itself after NYC OTB?

Editorial
Wasteland, N.Y.C.

Talk about shooting ducks: The Department of Investigation has established a six-person team to search out fraud, waste and corruption at the city Board of Elections.

By a wide margin, the board’s $100 million-a-year operation is the most patronage-ridden and incompetent arm of local government. Until now, it has largely dodged scrutiny because it answers not to the mayor but to Democratic and Republican party bosses.

Readers of this column will be well acquainted with some of the board’s farces and failures.

One entailed fielding an army of poll workers to staff the 2011 off-year elections, which drew fewer than 10 voters for every worker at most balloting sites.

Subsequently, DOI confirmed our estimate of millions of dollars wasted, and Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn now smartly follows up with the first sustained , independent oversight the board has gotten in, perhaps, a century.

Gill Hearn’s initial challenge will be to determine into which cesspool to dive first.

Our recommendation is that she start by raising the alarm that, without dramatic action, this year’s mayoral election will likely be a disaster.

That’s because the board will have to stage a runoff in the Democratic primary if no candidate tops 40% of the vote — which seems certain, given the competitive cast of candidates.

But the board’s electronic vote scanning machines cannot handle two elections within two weeks, let alone a primary, a runoff and a general election in eight weeks. Calibrating and programing the devices, counting votes and printing ballots simply take too long.

Here’s another juicy target to take on:

When New Yorkers register to vote, the board scans the signup cards into its computer system and then files them alphabetically in cabinets packed with cards dating back two decades.

There are vast rooms filled with such cabinets in the board’s borough offices, which are maintained by politically connected drones who get paid to keep the ever-expanding card files in alphabetic al order.

Not only is the work unnecessary, but the Legislature long ago relieved the board of having to keep the cards for more than two years. There’s no need to alphabetize them at all.

Then there’s patronage for DOI to catalog, along with nepotism so widespread that everyone on the payroll seems to be the brother, sister, mother, father, husband, wife or cousin of someone else on the payroll.

Then there’s a culture of laxity that puts voters last, most visibly seen in the board’s refusal for years to produce computer tallies of votes on Election Night while relying instead on more drones to laboriously tally votes by hand.

And who know what else DOI will find?

Happy hunting to Gill Hearn.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion#ixzz2RXMyzcx6