Opinion

Sacrificing a few scapegoats won’t fix the bungling Board of Elections

Board of Election officials are supposed to make voting run smoothly just a few times a year. Must they always screw up?

Tuesday brought reports of problems all across the city. In Brooklyn, 120,000 voters — one in eight — got dropped from voting rolls between last November and this month.

Elsewhere, folks found closed voting sites, broken machines, inadequate staffing levels and incompetent workers. On Wednesday, The Post ran a picture of one poll “worker” who’d been snoozing on the job.

Many “voters” found they couldn’t vote — and are rightly furious.

Yet Michael Ryan, the city Board of Elex executive director, actually bragged, “I’d really like to say how proud I am of my staff.”

He denied there were “mass numbers of disenfranchised voters in Brooklyn” and pooh-poohed reports of closed voting sites as “part and parcel of running elections in New York City.” That is: It’s OK they screwed up, because they always do.

Ryan might have excuses for some snafus. Voters get purged if they move, die or are deemed “inactive” (say, due to a wrong address) and don’t vote in two federal elections in a row.

But many New Yorkers surely walked away on being told to trust Board of Elex bozos to see that an “affidavit ballot” would count.

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office got five times as many complaints as during the 2012 general election. He’s launched a probe, as has city Comptroller Scott Stringer.

Suspending the chief BoE clerk in Brooklyn is a fair start — but not enough. Especially if, as Rich Calder reports in today’s Post, the BoE seems to be tossing the Republican clerk to the wolves while letting her Democratic deputy — who actually oversees the Democratic rolls — skate.

The Board of Election has a long record of incompetence. The root blame lies with the party bosses who control the whole thing — and use it as a patronage mill. Will Schneiderman and Stringer dare point fingers at the true culprits?