This is why we can't have nice things. Now, in a place called Hempstead, on New York's Long Island, a school clerk and a candidate overseeing a school board election were caught tearing up and discarding ballots to help rig an election.
A Long Island school clerk overseeing board of education elections tore up ballots and threw them in a dumpster to help her favorite candidate win, a newly revealed internal probe found.
Hempstead Union Free School District Clerk April Keys allegedly rigged the May 19 trustee election by smuggling official ballots out of her office and handing absentee ballots to favored candidate Victor Pratt so he could trash them, according to a 51-page petition filed by the district with the state Education Department.
Keys could now face criminal charges as the district is looking to overturn Pratt’s razor-thin win.
“The Board of Education Trustee election must be overturned because widespread irregularities affected the outcome of the election and were so pervasive that they vitiated the electoral process,” the filing, from the Hempstead school district’s attorneys, said.
This is why the American people are losing faith in our elections; we're just plain seeing too many cases like this.
One, mind you, is too many.
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This interference arguably led to a fraudulent election win for Victor Pratt. It's possible that the entire election may now be tossed out as invalid.
Question marks were first raised by the district after it discovered major irregularities in its election.
Pratt won by just 81 votes — boosted by a suspiciously large number of absentee and early mail ballots that boosted him to the win even though he only came in third on machine voting, the probe found.
Pratt racked up 87% of absentee votes and 55% of early mail votes, compared to just 27% of in-person machine votes – while other trustee candidates received fewer than 100 absentee and early mail ballots combined, the probe found.
It's anyone's guess how often this kind of thing goes on in small local elections like this. This is, once again, an argument for doing away with early voting and mail-in ballots, as those are what were being destroyed in this case.
The issue with school board elections is that they are too often not included in most community general elections, which are generally held, you know, on election day. School board elections are all too often held on odd days throughout the year; they are not well known, and turnout is abysmally low in most locales. This makes them fertile ground for shenanigans, since a few votes can tip the scales towards a candidate that the local school board and the teachers' union prefer.
That's not a recipe for good education, and if you want to see how well that's working out, just look at the sinking test scores of American youths.
Want to change that? Find out when your local school board elections are. Look into who the candidates are: Their background, their stated policy positions. Look into how well your local schools are doing. Then, make sure you vote in those school board elections.
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