Your School Board Election Is the Cheapest One in America to Steal, Just Ask Hempstead

A man finished third and finished first. Same election, same night.

In the Hempstead Union Free School District on Long Island, a sitting trustee named Victor Pratt came in third at the voting machines on May 19. Then somebody counted the absentee ballots, and Pratt was on top. The votes that flipped it turned up a few days later torn into pieces, double bagged, sitting in standing water in a dumpster behind the school.

The official who ran that election, District Clerk April Keys, is the one a district investigation accuses of engineering it. On June 25 the state threw out the result and ordered a do-over.

You can read this as a story about one crooked clerk and a guy who moonlights as a local DJ called DJ Vic-Lover. It is more interesting than that, and worse. The system worked exactly the way it was built to work, right up until a garbage can got noticed.

The referee worked for one of the teams#

Here is how a school board election actually runs, the part that never makes the flyer. The person who administers it, processes the absentee ballots, and safeguards the materials is the district clerk. The district clerk is an employee of the district. The district is run by the school board. And the school board members are the people whose names are on the ballot.

Read that chain again, slowly. The referee is hired by one of the teams. Nobody finds this strange, because nobody is watching, which is the whole problem and most of this column.

April Keys was no outsider. She had worked for Hempstead since 2008, made about $111,000 as a confidential secretary plus a $25,000 clerk stipend, and had sued the board and its members in the past. An insider, running the election that decides who the insiders are.

The lever was the absentee ballot. Pratt lost the in-person vote. Then the mailed ballots came in, and he had 82 of them, while each of his three opponents had absentee totals you could count on one hand. Third place at the machines. First place once the clerk's pile was counted.

When investigators asked why Keys had refused help processing the early voting applications, her stated reason, according to the report, was that she did not want "too many hands in the cookie jar." Sit with that one. The person guarding the ballots told you, in her own words, that she wanted fewer people watching. They are not always hiding it.

The cheapest election in America to steal#

Now the part that travels past one district. Pratt won the seat with 288 votes, a margin of 81. That is the whole election. Not 81,000. Eighty-one.

School board races are among the lowest-turnout elections we hold. Odd dates in May, no president on the ticket, no coverage, no reason for a busy parent to even know it is happening. Almost nobody shows up, and nobody in charge is in a hurry to change that.

Here is the math that should bother you. To swing a presidential election you would have to move millions of votes. To swing a school board seat you need a couple hundred absentee envelopes and the person who counts them. One of those is impossible. The other one allegedly just happened in Nassau County, with a garbage bag.

The smaller and sleepier the race, the cheaper it is to own. A school board is the cheapest of all. What Keys is accused of doing crudely and criminally, a single organized slate can do quietly and legally in any election this small, with nothing fancier than a mailing list and a stack of absentee ballot applications: when only a few hundred people vote, whoever turns out a few hundred votes wins. The crime was the trash can. The vulnerability was the empty room.

They only caught it because the insiders turned on each other#

The evidence here is not subtle, which is the single piece of luck in the whole story.

Surveillance cameras caught Pratt leaving the clerk's office the night before the election carrying what the district's lawyer estimated at 75 to 125 absentee ballots. Asked later what he did with them, he said he could not remember.

Then a garbage can that had been sitting in the clerk's office went missing. The district's own attorneys went looking and found the bag in a dumpster: ripped up cast votes mixed with shredded mail ballot applications, voters' names still legible, tied inside a second bag for good measure. State law says you preserve election materials for six months. Somebody preferred a few days.

The lawyer who ran the investigation, Austin Graff, wrote the line the whole thing turns on. The problem, he said, "may be much worse than [what] can be proven." Translation: this is just the part that did not make it into the dumpster in time.

And here is the detail that should keep you up. The only reason any of this surfaced is that the board refused to certify the result and hired its own lawyer to dig. The single check on the system was that the insiders happened to turn on each other this time. If they had all been on the same side, the can disappears, the bag rots, and Pratt gets sworn in. None of you ever learn the name April Keys.

There is a real person on the other end of this. Gwendolyn Jackson came in second once the clerk's absentee pile was counted, and she does not see why she has to run the race all over again to win one she believes she already won. "Everything points to me having won the election," she told Newsday. And she does not get those months back.

This is not even Hempstead's first disputed election. The district fought over trustee results in 2014 and 2015 too. The machine has a service history.

The state's own fix gives away the secret#

When Commissioner Betty Rosa ordered the new election, she did one quiet thing that tells you everything. She would not let the district run it. She brought in an outsider, Neil Boyle from the Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES, to serve as clerk for the do-over.

Sit with what that means. The state's official remedy was to take the election away from the people who normally administer it. That is an admission, written into a government order, that a district running its own board election is the thing that broke.

So the fix is not complicated, and it is not partisan. School board elections should be run by someone who does not work for the board, on the regular November ballot when people actually turn out, with the materials preserved and outside observers allowed in the room. Every piece of that is boring. Every piece of it would have strangled this scheme in the crib.

The election you are not watching#

Here is why a clerk in Hempstead is worth your time. Of every government that touches your kid, the school board is the closest one. It hires the superintendent and signs off on the budget, and it decides the curriculum, the books, and a good deal of what your child gets told about the world.

Then we hand it out in the one election almost nobody shows up for. To the people already inside the building, that empty room is not a flaw. It is the point.

The garbage can is what turned this one into a news story. But the garbage can was never the scandal. The scandal is the machine it fell out of, the one still running smoothly in every district where no lawyer ever went looking.

So three questions, and take them to your next board meeting. Do you know when your school board election is held? Do you know who counts the absentee ballots? And do you know who that person works for?

Victor Pratt was counting on you not knowing. They usually are.