The director of the city’s beleaguered Board of Elections failed to properly report several swanky trips funded by the company that manufactures the city’s problem-plagued voting machines.
New York City has doled out at least $43 million to Election Systems and Software over the past decade for its frequently-on-the-fritz ballot scanners and other machines — and the Board of Elections often defends the faulty contraptions.
That loyalty is under scrutiny after NY1 revealed Monday that Michael Ryan, the head of the city’s Board of Elections, failed to accurately report multiple trips he made as a member of the company’s “National Customer Advisory Board.”
Ryan has stayed in historic and high end hotels and dined on sushi across the country thanks to ES&S.
He did not properly log the trips with the Conflicts of Interest Board, omitting several of them on annual financial disclosure forms, according to NY1.
The board chalked up the discrepancies to a clerical error that has since been rectified, a spokeswoman told the Daily News.
NY1 reported that Ryan traveled nine times on ES&S’ dime, to a number of cities, including Las Vegas, Charleston, S.C., and Fort Lauderdale between 2014 and this year. However, his financial disclosure forms initially only stated that he went to Omaha, Nebraska, and Buffalo.
During a Nebraska trip in 2017, the company put Ryan up in a historic hotel, NY1 noted. It also treated board members to a sushi dinner. In Vegas last year, Ryan and other board members crashed at the popular Cosmopolitan Hotel.
“There was no gambling going on at that. It was — I flew out to Nevada on a Wednesday, had a conference on a Thursday, came home on Friday,” Ryan told the station. “There’s nothing more, nothing less than that.”
In 2016, Election Systems and Software paid for Ryan to stay in a Manhattan hotel, even though he lives on Staten Island.
Each trip cost between $1,000 and $4,999, according to financial disclosure forms obtained by The News.
Ryan received approval from the Conflicts of Interest Board to serve on the voting machine company’s advisory panel in 2014.
Emails reviewed by The News on Tuesday show that the Conflict of Interest Board determined that no waiver was required for the travel.
Both Ryan and Election Systems and Software faced intense scrutiny last month after ballot scanners across the city jammed and the Board of Elections blamed the mayhem on a two page ballot and high-voter turnout.
The Board of Elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
