The New York State Board of Elections has issued an urgent warning about a text message that voters across the state are receiving, directing them to their polling place. The problem? It’s sending voters to the wrong location.

A News10NBC employee received one of these messages, which listed their name and correct address but directed them to the wrong polling place, Susan B. Wiley Elementary School. The message suggested double-checking the information on the legitimate New York State Board of Elections website.

To investigate, I first consulted with Reg Harnish, CEO of cybersecurity firm OrbitalFire.

Deanna Dewberry: “The link that they ask you to click on looks exactly like the Board of Elections. So what could be going on here?”

Reg Harnish: “The address is absolutely 100 percent legitimate. What we have to distinguish now is legitimate and sketchy.”

This raised the question: Was this voter misinformation masquerading as legitimate by using the real Board of Elections website? Further investigation revealed that this was not a cybercrime attempt to steal personal information or install malware.

But could it be election fraud? For answers, I contacted the State Board of Elections.

Deanna Dewberry, News10NBC: “Something that seems to be consistent is it has the wrong polling location. Do you believe this to be a nefarious attempt at voter suppression?”

Kathleen McGrath, Director of Public Information, NYS Board of Elections: “One of the things I did is I reached out directly to the company. The text message was signed by an organization, a get out the vote kind of grassroots organization. So I reached out and said this is an issue. People are getting wrong polling information and we can’t have this type of confusion leading up to primary day today. The company was very apologetic. They admitted that this was human error that led to some missorting of data in terms of voters and polling places.”

The group, Vote-FTW, aims to empower voters to participate in the democratic process. On its website, it apologized for the mistake and said they sent follow-up text messages explaining the error and directing people to the Board of Elections website.

While this appears to have been an honest mistake by a legitimate grassroots organization, voter misinformation campaigns are a real threat. If you ever have questions about your polling location, go directly to the New York State Board of Elections polling station look-up site.

If you believe you’ve been a victim of an election law violation or see something suspicious, you can report that to the state’s Division of Election Law Enforcement. 

I emailed the organization that sent the emails, VoteFTW.  A spokesman said the mistake was the result of human error and affected 5% to 10% of the text messages they sent.  Here is the group’s full statement:

We agree with the NY Board of Elections that the best place to get information about elections and voting is directly from the New York State Board of Elections and the County Boards of Elections. That’s why our initial texts – even the ones with the wrong images – directed NYers to the official polling place look up tool at https://voterlookup.elections.ny.gov/. We’ve been in touch with the NY Board of Elections and issued an apology and correction text to everyone who got the wrong info, directing them to that website. 

This was not an act of voter suppression, but rather one of human error affecting a small subset of the people we texted. We apologize for the texts that had misleading information, this was due to a data and tech issue on our side where we did have the correct voter data, but in some cases (we estimate about 5%-10% of the texts we sent) we matched the voter to the wrong polling place by mistake. We are investigating so that this does not happen again. Once we learned that some texts had the wrong polling place info, we immediately stopped sending out any new texts. 

Our organization has a goal to mobilize voters to make their voices heard. While we regret our mistake, we believe that technology and digital outreach can help get crucial voting information to Americans this election cycle. We will always refer voters to official platforms such as their county and state board of elections to ensure they are getting the most accurate information. 

See your statement for more: https://www.voteftw.com/statement-regarding-new-york-polling-location-images

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