The City Politic

Who Won? A complicated new voting system meets an archaic bureaucracy.

- David Freedlander

GUY VELELLA WAS THE kind of colorful politician who represents a different era in New York City. A Bronx Republican state senator from 1986 to 2004, he led the borough’s Republican Party as it slid into irrelevance, failing to back Rudy Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg in their mayoral runs. The married father of four kept an “Albany wife,” as the saying used to go, had an out-of-wedlock daughter with her, and steered a $24,000 pension payment to his mistress’s mother. After a career marked by ethical lapses, he was sent to Rikers Island in 2004 for accepting bribes but was released a few months later after an obscure panel packed with political appointees recommended he and his cronies be let go, saying they seemed “distraught.”

Velella died in 2011, but his legacy lives on at the city’s Board of Elections, where Dawn Sandow, a longtime Velella aide, is the de facto executive director; the actual executive director, Michael Ryan, has been on a monthslong medical leave. Sandow, entrusted with administering the city’s first ranked-choice-vote election (and its promise of forward-thinking democratic elections), was probed by the Department of Investigation in 2007 for not actually living in the Bronx and for doing campaign work on government time. Still, people familiar with the BOE’s inner workings describe her as one of the more capable employees at an agency that has long been a swamp of incompetence and patronage. “People come to you, tell you they need a job, and you send them to the BOE,” one city councilman told me. “It’s a cesspool.”