"Miscommunication" Led To NYC Board Of Elections Shredding 20 Pages Of GOP Petitions

First the Brooklyn Board of Elections office was unearthing old votes... and now they're shredding new signatures.

Mere weeks after the Daily News reported the Board's Brooklyn outpost dug up nearly 1,600 uncounted votes from 2012, the agency confirms a Board worker in the same office mistakenly destroyed 20 pages of 2013 Republican petitions.

It wasn't immediately clear Monday exactly how the petitions -- voter signature sheets that are gathered to get candidates on the ballot -- ended up in the dustbin of electoral history.

"A single petition volume of 20 pages was inadvertently destroyed" last Friday, Board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez said in a statement responding to a Daily News inquiry about the destroyed docs.?

"Fortunately, we have obtained copies of the petition volume in question from both the filer and a member of the public who had previously requested a copy of this volume," Vazquez continued. "Board staff compared the two copies and found them to be identical."

Vazquez chalked up the shredding to a simple "miscommunication" between employees at the oft-criticized agency.

The Board also couldn't immediately say exactly which Republican candidates appeared on the scrapped petitions -- which are supposed to be retained on file by the agency after they're submitted -- but we await an update.

There's nothing short of an open civil war going on between factions of the Brooklyn GOP right now, so Republican politics in the borough are heated, to say the least. The party faithful are mainly split between support of county Chairman Craig Eaton and of state Sen. Martin Golden.

Update: I am told by several GOP sources that the petitions in question carried the names of Joe Hynes for district attorney, John Burnett for controller and candidates for the GOP county committee for the 46th Assembly District. (The members of the county committee are important here because of their role in determining who serves as chairman of the borough party.)

The current male district leader for the 46th is Simon Shamoun, who was appointed the Brooklyn GOP Commissioner on the Board of Elections earlier this year in a power grab engineered by the Republican caucus of the City Council.

Update: I'm also told two workers from the bipartisan Board were involved in the Friday shredding incident. Both are Democrats. That in itself is interesting because typically, petitions are watched over by a team -- one Democrat and one Republican.

Regardless of party or borough, Board of Elections snafus are hardly new to city voters.

We reported July 3 that the 2012 election results had to be recertifed yet again after a Board audit revealed 1,579 votes cast in Brooklyn last November had never been pulled from the memory sticks that store data from the city's electronic ballot scanners.

Those votes were added to the grand total, as had been a previous batch of more than 400 votes cast in various parts of the city and dug up by Board workers months after last November's election.

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Source: http://feeds.nydailynews.com/~r/nydnrss/blogs/dailypolitics/~3/qbSx3sJX6wI/story01.htm

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