When a Republican employee of the New York City Board of Elections told a woman that if she paid $150, she could have a job working at the polls during local elections, the woman hesitated but eventually agreed.
Unable to afford the fee on her own, she said she went to her husband, who gave her the money, even though he felt uneasy about the deal.
The small payment, she said, seemed worth it for the chance to earn a few thousand dollars for election work.
Poll workers in the Bronx say her experience was not unusual — and that it has been going on for years.
The woman is among several election workers who say that Board of Elections staff members and officials of the Bronx Republican Party inappropriately pressured them into paying for jobs or that they saw their peers similarly pressured. Three people who paid for their positions spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
Their stories follow a federal investigation that culminated in the indictment by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of a Board of Elections employee who was charged last August with extortion, bribery and fraud after federal prosecutors said she took kickbacks to place Bronx residents in temporary election jobs. The employee who was indicted, Nicole Torres, is expected to plead guilty in April after making a deal with prosecutors, court records show. Her lawyer, Amy Gallicchio, declined to comment.
The workers who spoke with The New York Times said the scheme ran much deeper than the charges detailed in the indictment of Ms. Torres. Their accusations follow years of trouble inside the city’s elections board, which has grappled with a host of problems including nepotism and sexual harassment.
“The agency has long suffered from a reputation for prioritizing favoritism over professionalism,” said Joanna Zdanys, deputy director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank focused on democracy and voting rights issues. If the accusations are true, she said, “they’re an affront to the city’s voters and to the many Board of Elections workers who show up every day to serve them with integrity.”
Ms. Zdanys said she was unaware of any similar allegations lodged elsewhere in the city.
Poll workers in New York can earn about $2,750 each election cycle if they work all nine early-voting days plus Election Day. Elected district leaders in each borough, both Republicans and Democrats, get a say in assigning people to those roles.
But poll workers in the Bronx described a pay-to-play scheme in which getting and keeping coveted jobs required contributing money and collecting signatures to help Republican candidates get on the ballot.
Their payments — usually $150 apiece and sometimes several times in one election cycle — were recorded in state campaign finance records as donations to the Bronx Republican Party.
The individual payments were modest, but the arrangement could undermine faith in the elections board and in elections more broadly, prosecutors and election experts say.
Federal grand jury subpoenas sent last spring to a Bronx Republican Party member and a Board of Elections administrator suggest that prosecutors have investigated the possibility of a larger scheme. They sought information about how poll workers were selected, trained and placed at polls and any payments to and from them, a copy of the subpoena obtained by The Times showed.
The subpoenas were served a few months before a federal grand jury voted to indict Ms. Torres, who was fired by the Board of Elections less than two months later.
It has been nearly a year since the subpoenas were served, and no additional public charges have yet been brought.
Ms. Torres, also a Republican district leader in the Bronx, took payments of about $150 apiece from Bronx residents — at least $36,000 in all — and funneled it into her personal bank account and to an unnamed Bronx organization, according to the indictment.
A spokesman for the Board of Elections said investigators contacted their office about the case over the summer, and that the agency “immediately” provided them access to Ms. Torres’s workstation in the Bronx.
“We have not heard any additional information from anyone regarding this investigation since,” he wrote in an email. “We would have no further comment on the matter as we wouldn’t do so pending the outcome of their investigation.”
The chairman of the Bronx Republican Party, Mike Rendino, declined to comment. When a reporter knocked on the door of his Long Island home, he threatened to call the police.
The three workers interviewed by The Times said that when the city added early voting hours ahead of Election Day in 2019, it was a game changer. More days meant more money, but those shifts were tougher to come by, according to one worker.
One poll worker said he was told by a fellow employee that if he wanted the gig, he had to talk to a Republican Party district leader. That official told him it would cost $170 — $20 to join the Bronx Republican Party and $150 for tickets to a fund-raising dinner, he said.
The man said he paid the $170, but the fund-raising dinner was canceled because of the pandemic. He didn’t get his money back; a Republican poll worker who had collected it told him to consider it a donation to the Republican Party that would help him get a job working the polls, he said.
State campaign finance records showed that the man paid the Bronx Republican Party a total of $450 in 2021 in two installments.
Later, he said a Republican district leader also asked him to collect signatures to help Republican candidates qualify to appear on election ballots. Still, he said he was not guaranteed a slot working every election cycle.
The woman whose payments did get her a role in every election said Democratic poll workers warned her against paying the money. And when her district leader asked her to start recruiting others to pay, she said many refused.
Staceyann Deleon and Charles Perkins, who have worked at poll sites in the Bronx for several years, both said they heard from fellow workers — Democrats and Republicans — about paying Ms. Torres, and other district leaders, for their jobs.
John Perez, a former Democratic district leader in the Bronx, said he received complaints from several poll workers about it — and witnessed some arrangements firsthand. In some cases, he said, if prospective poll workers couldn’t come up with the money up front, they were given loans that they had to pay back with interest.
Another board employee who is also a longtime member of the Bronx Republican Party said her party dues rose to $150 from $25 when early voting was rolled out.
Workers were told that paying their dues would give them “preference” and “priority” for election jobs, she said. Having been a party member for years, she was accustomed to paying fees and did not think much of it, given party leaders said the money would propel the party forward.
It was not until she started hearing her peers told that they could not work if they did not pay that she questioned the arrangement, she said. Then, “quiet whispers” grew to a roar when she said she learned that investigators raided the Board of Elections office in the Bronx last spring.