In leaving the race, Mr. Thompson called the board’s failure to deliver official results nearly a week after the vote a “disgrace.” He’s right, though its incompetence is hardly a surprise. This was the election, after all, where more than 5,000 antique lever-action voting machines had to be dragged out of storage because the board knew it couldn’t get optical-scanning machines ready for a possible runoff. The board, whose members are appointed by county leaders of both parties, is a patronage-riddled agency with one job, which it does very poorly. Last Friday, workers were caught snoozing among the voting machines they were supposed to be rechecking.
The most appealing solution is just to abolish the board, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg has urged for years, and to replace it with a nonpartisan body of skilled professionals. But that would require rewriting the State Constitution, which the Legislature would resist.