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NY Election Officials Warn About Voter Roll Vigilantes

Putnam and Suffolk county residents were among those confronted, a BOE spokesperson said.


HUDSON VALLEY, NY — The New York Board of Elections is warning that voters across the state are being confronted by people impersonating election officials regarding their registration status, and erroneously accused of committing a crime because of how they appear in the state voter database.

"We are extremely alarmed by these actions. These individuals are impersonating government officials in an effort to intimidate voters based on inaccurate and misleading information," Raymond J. Riley III, Co-Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, said in a statement issued Aug. 30. "We strongly encourage those engaging in these activities to cease immediately."

The state BOE knows that residents were contacted in Albany, Chautauqua, Jefferson, Onondaga, Ontario, Orange, Putnam, Saratoga, Schenectady, Steuben, Suffolk, Warren, and Washington counties, spokesperson Kathleen McGrath told Patch.


"This list may grow, as this is an ongoing situation," she said. "And it’s impossible to know how many other incidents may have occurred, where the voter did not alert a County Board or local law enforcement."

The State Board alerted all county boards Aug. 29 and encouraged them to track details of any incidents and report them to local law enforcement. The State Board has passed along information to state and federal law enforcement, as well.


"There have been cases where the voter has been confronted by individual(s) claiming to be from a Board of Elections (some demanding to see the voter’s license). The individual(s) have claimed the voter is committing a crime by being registered to vote in multiple places in New York State," she wrote in an email. "In each case we have seen thus far, the voter has been properly registered at their current address, but had an earlier voter registration at a former address in a different county in the state (which has been properly purged by the county, as is the normal process when New Yorkers move from county to county). In other words, the voter only had one active registration in the database, and it was at their current address."

Putnam County Board of Elections Commissioner Cathy Croft told Patch that four residents had called the BOE after being approached. They called because they had become concerned about the status of their voter registration, she said.

"Calls came from all over the county including Philipstown, Carmel and Kent," she said.

State officials said county elections board staffs work year-round to ensure elections are safe and secure, including extensive record-keeping to protect from bad actors — including these.

State officials said a voter approached by someone claiming to be from the state or a county board of elections should immediately request identification. "If the individual refuses or appears under suspicious circumstances, the State Board recommends collecting as much information as possible, not providing the individual with any personal information, and contacting local law enforcement to report the incident."

Criminal impersonation in the second degree is a class A misdemeanor in New York.

"While we note the pattern of activity and believe it to be a coordinated effort, we will leave determining who is responsible for these interactions with voters up to law enforcement," McGrath said.

Although the State Board of Elections did not name any suspected perpetrators, a group called New York Citizens Audit issued a statement Aug. 31 implying that the state could be making a "precipitous and unfounded" announcement that could discourage citizen participation in "legal investigations of election procedures."

The group's executive director told the USA Today network that her group had started "doing field work after state officials failed to act on its allegations about duplicate registrations and more" and insisted her "researchers" were using "lawful methods," the Times Herald-Record reported.

The group's voter fraud allegations were detailed in a March article on syracuse.com, after which the paper's editorial board weighed in with an opinion piece: "NY election ‘citizen auditors’ are playing a dangerous game."