School elections 2023: Why Valley Stream District 24 parents complain of confusion over voting sites, lost votes.

The school board elections are over, but weighing on several voters’ minds in Valley Stream District 24 is a common cloud of confusion and commotion that defined their voting experience.

Each voter’s circumstances may  be unique, but they all circle back to one core issue: residents and parents, upon arriving at their customary polling place, were directed to another voting location.

Residents like Michael Belfiore and his wife, Ellen, who rarely skip a school board election, wanted to get their votes in early. Heeding the election information card mailed to them by the teachers’ union, which specified the Corona Avenue Fire House as a polling place, they opted to go there the morning of the election in lieu of their usual spot at Brooklyn Avenue School. When pollsters couldn’t find their names on the voter registration list, they drove to their customary voting spot at Brooklyn Avenue only to be redirected — once again — to William L. Buck School.

“It was really annoying,” Belfiore said. Though he says he was partly to blame for this perplexing situation, “not having read the card information close enough.” He said fellow parents and residents also found themselves in a similar snafu, traveling to Brooklyn Avenue only to be told their designated polling spot was somewhere else.

Others, like parent Jeanette Gonzales, traveled to Corona Avenue Fire House, where she has voted for several election cycles. She was puzzled to find it closed. “I thought, maybe it’ll open later on to accommodate people who are working,” Gonz ales said.

“I went back around 5 p.m. to the firehouse and it was desolate,” she added. “And there was no sign whatsoever to direct people on where to find the proper polling place.”

She chalked up her uncertainty to a faulty poll-finding link posted on the district’s website, which she claims directed her to the New York State Board of Elections poll tracker. The tracker provided information on her designated polling site for county and statewide government elections, even though she was searching for her designated school board polling spot.

Inquiring through Facebook and her personal contacts, she was eventually sent a link to the district’s dedicated poll-finding website that directed her to cast her ballot at Brooklyn Avenue School. That’s when she realized her designated polling place for school board elections had suddenly changed this year.

“The confusion certainly was a deterrence,” she said. “If my network hadn’t had the right information lined up, my husband and I would have guessed that the election was cancelled or postponed and would have decided to just go home. Our votes would not have been counted.”

Hoping to spare others the same logistical headache, Gonzalez said she made several phone calls to neighbors heading to cast their ballots at the fire house urging them to “turn the car around and go to Brooklyn Avenue to vote.”

Candidates Rachel Figurasmith and Cristina Arroyo claimed their phones were also buzzing with questions from confused parents and residents. “It’s not our jobs as candidates” but the two spent much of the day redirecting people to the correct poll finding information, noted Arroyo.

“At around 5 p.m., Cristina and I contacted the district alongside the New York Civil Liberties Union, urging officials to update their website with the correct link, which they eventually did,” said Figurasmith. “Poll watchers from the NYCLU were also there on the ground to make sure people weren’t being deterred from voting.”

The NYCLU could not be reached for comment after repeated requests.

Presuming that the district had fumbled in providing the correct poll-finding link on their website, a mistake of this kind, suggests election experts, is a glaringly obvious one to make.

“New York State school board elections are not covered in state election law. They are covered in the state education law, so the county Board of Elections has nothing to do with the school board elections,” said Michele Lamberti, vice president of the Port Washington-Manhasset division of the League of Women Voters.

“The county BOE does not register school board voters, keep school board voter registration records, and pick poll sites. These responsibilities fall to the school district. School districts keep their own voter registration rolls for school board elections which are not the same rolls kept by the county or the state.”

Civic experts have long stressed that convenience and clear voting information are prime factors relative to higher voter turnout. In an election season that saw roughly 40 percent fewer votes than last year, critics say that these potential oversight failures by the district dampened and discouraged turnout. Though how much of an influence, if any, remains unclear.

In any case, Figurasmith and Arroyo echoed parents’ concerns that forcing voters to wade through conflicting election information chips away at the public trust in the election process and the fairness of its results.

It’s what pushed them to file an appeal before the Commissioner of Education. It’s a move which has effectively barred the district from commenting further on the cause of its election day chaos.

The biggest bone of contention for candidate Figurasmith, however, came after the ballots were counted. The election results, obtained by the Herald, which provide the final ballot count for each candidate per polling site show Figurasmith’s opponent, Cynthia Nuñez, handily netting more votes in almost every polling site except for one: Brooklyn Avenue School.

Votes for Nuñez are clearly marked in the boxes for absentee and non-absentee votes: 68 non-absentee votes and 5 absentees. But rather than numbers, Figurasmith’s boxes have been left eerily blank. Now, parents who voted for me at Brooklyn Avenue are shaking their heads in what seems like a mysterious loss of their vote, said Figurasmith.

“I was really disappointed with how seriously the district seems to have taken voting,” she said. “It’s not my place to say that we should redo the election, but this is an incomplete election, and all the votes need to be counted.”

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