The vendor that botched 100,000 absentee ballots bound for Brooklyn voters — giving the New York City Board of Elections its latest black eye — acknowledged Wednesday that the scope of the screwup extends to Long Island.
Rochester-based Phoenix Graphics botched mailings and will have to resend ballots to nearly 800 voters living in Nassau County, officials there confirmed to The Post.
“The concern is that you don’t want voters to think the system doesn’t work. It definitely does work,” said Jim Scheuerman, a Democratic commissioner on Nassau’s Board of Elections. “There was an issue with the vendor. We didn’t want this to happen but the problem is being rectified quickly.”
The printing company said in a statement that it “experienced mechanical-inserting issues” when producing the ballots for Brooklyn and Long Island that affected “less than 1 percent of mailings.”
“Phoenix Graphics is in the process of reprinting and mailing all materials to correct the project and will be covering all expenses related to the production and postage,” the statement said.
Phoenix president Sal DeBiase added that he was “truly sorry for the inconvenience that has occurred.”
Word of the problem in the suburbs came just one day after the Big Apple’s elections administrator acknowledged that Phoenix may have bungled mailings to more than 99,000 voters in Kings County by including return envelopes addressed to the wrong voter in the package.
Officials at the embattled city BOE said they planned to resend the packages — with new ballot scantrons and properly addressed return envelops — to all of the potentially affected voters. Phoenix, the BOE added, would pick up the tab.
The absentee ballot return envelopes are linked to the voter identification system used by New York City’s poll books, making it virtually impossible for anyone to vote twice — even if they received two ballots.
However, just hours after that plan was announced, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top staffers began working the phones to pressure the city BOE to reverse course and only send new envelops. His office confirmed the push in a statement late Tuesday.
The city Board of Elections said Wednesday it would go ahead with plans to fix the screwup by having Phoenix resend the absentee voting packages to more than 99,000 Kings County voters included in the first wave of mailings. The company, officials added, would pick up the tab.
It’s the same solution that the Long Island elections officials adopted, but Gov. Cuomo’s office mounted an attempt to intervene late Tuesday, working the phones to pressure the city BOE to only send new envelops to Brooklyn voters.
Sources suspected that Cuomo’s push is being driven by fears that President Trump could argue that sending another round of ballots will open the process to double voting, though Cuomo’s office declined to comment on the motivation.
Trump — a vocal critic of voting by mail — tweeted about the mess Wednesday morning.
“Wow! 100,000 Mail In Ballots in New York City a total MESS,” he wrote. “Cancel Ballots and go out and VOTE, just like in past decades, when there were no problems!”
New York state first approved a dramatic expansion of its absentee ballot program for the June primaries as the coronavirus pandemic tore through the five boroughs to prevent the typical Election Day crowding at polls, which could allow the disease to easily spread.
However, the patronage-laden city Board of Elections struggled and ended up disqualifying more than 80,000 votes for largely technical reasons — many of which were caused by the board itself.