Secretary of State William F. Galvin said he’s appointing a receiver inside the city of Boston’s Elections Commission to help oversee the department through 2026, including for this year’s mayoral vote, after the department stumbled through several “unacceptable” problems last fall.
Galvin released an order Monday mandating several changes in the department after his office investigated and confirmed complaints that polling locations in the city didn’t receive enough ballots during November’s election.
State officials had been in talks with city officials, but Galvin said in a Globe interview that he determined last week they wouldn’t be able to reach a voluntary settlement that “was sufficient.”
Galvin said Monday his office’s probe found that the issues weren’t contained to a few precincts but were “citywide” and violated state law. His office said the city’s election officials also mishandled communications with poll workers, calling it a “systemic problem” amid an expectedly busy presidential election. Boston voters cast roughly 265,400 ballots in November, putting turnout at roughly 60 percent.
Among the problems Galvin’s office uncovered: Two phone lines the city set up to handle calls about machines breaking down and ballot-related problems received roughly 1,690 calls on Election Day, but the vast majority went unanswered, according to data from city officials. Galvin’s office said 1,205 calls were “not connected.”
“It’s a basic management problem, and the management was not there,” Galvin, an eight-term Democrat from Brighton, said Monday. Poll workers “couldn’t get an answer. They weren’t calling them back. That’s unacceptable.”
Galvin has yet to appoint the receiver but said that, ideally, his designee would have experience with administering local elections.
In a statement to the Globe late Monday night, Mayor Michelle Wu’s office said it had worked with Galvin’s office over several months to investigate “operational missteps,” suggested actions it could take to address them, and that it worked to “finalize the language of an agreement codifying these steps, which are now reflected in the order.”
Wu’s office provided the Globe a copy of what it called a draft agreement with Galvin’s office that was dated Feb. 14. The language in several parts is similar to what Galvin’s office included in the investigative report and order it released Monday. But it was unclear if city officials agreed with all of the wording; the draft included notes in the margins, in which city officials appeared to question some of the language.
“The City welcomes the Secretary of State’s order as a tool to restore full confidence in the Elections Department,” Emma Pettit, a Wu spokesperson, said in the statement. Wu’s office said it also signed a $50,000 contract with the firm, The Elections Group, to review the elections department’s operations.
“The City has already begun to implement these steps for the upcoming municipal election to ensure that ballot shortages and the related problems never happen again,” Pettit said.
Galvin said he released his order Monday because he believed his office needed to act ahead of April, when the city is scheduled to begin distributing nomination papers for the mayoral and City Council races.
Wu, a first-term Democrat, is running for reelection this fall, when the entire City Council will also be on the ballot. Longtime nonprofit leader Josh Kraft, the third son of billionaire Patriots owner Robert Kraft, this month formally launched a challenge of Wu.
It’s not the first time the state has tightened oversight over Boston’s elections department. Galvin took a similar action in 2006, when the city agreed to be overseen by his office through the 2008 presidential election after acknowledging that it violated state laws when it failed to supply enough ballots to polling places during that November’s election.
That year, Boston had distributed far fewer ballots than there were registered voters at polling places, and more than three dozen polling places ran out of ballots amid high turnout. In scenes similar to last November, police cruisers had to speed ballots through rush-hour traffic in 2006.
State law requires that city officials provide polling locations with at least one ballot for each registered voter.
City elections officials “unilaterally” decided to, instead, distribute enough ballots last November to cover just 80 percent of the number of registered voters in each precinct who had not yet voted, either by mail-in ballot or during the early voting period, according to a report from Galvin’s office. But because of what his office described as a “calculation error,” the number of ballots the city actually delivered to each polling location for Election Day was “significantly lower” than the city’s target.
Poll workers at several precincts began complaining to the elections department as early as 11:30 a.m. that they were running low on ballots, according to Galvin’s investigation.
City officials told investigators they use a team of roughly 14 staff members and volunteers to call each of the precincts to gauge turnout starting at 9 a.m., and they “should have recognized” then some precincts were low on ballots, according to Galvin’s office.
“Instead, having not properly followed the foregoing procedure, events soon cascaded into a more systemic problem throughout the City as election workers were unable to reach the Boston Election Department at City Hall because their calls were not connecting,” Rebecca Murray, general counsel for Galvin’s office, wrote in the seven-page report.
Some polling locations ran out of ballots for a “significant period of time,” Murray wrote.
“This resulted in voters in the City experiencing needless and unacceptable delays in voting and, in some cases, disfranchisement because the voter was unable to wait,” she said.
Wu said last fall that the city typically bases its turnout predictions — and therefore how many ballots are delivered to each polling location — on numbers from previous elections.
She added that certain polling locations also ran out of ballots due to higher-than-expected turnout in 2006 and 2008, “but there should be a more seamless mechanism to be able to replenish them before they fully run out in any location.”
At the time, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based advocacy group, said a lack of ballots at polling sites in Hyde Park and Roslindale amounted to a “colossal planning failure” that disenfranchised Boston’s communities of color.
In its report, Galvin’s office did not detail exactly which, or how many, precincts ran out of ballots. But it described the problems as widespread.
Murray wrote that the city also did not properly train election workers on numerous eventualities ranging from what to do when ballot quantities ran low or when “voting machine problems arose.”
Under Galvin’s order, the city will have to provide a “comprehensive plan,” developed with his office, about how it prepares for elections, its Election Day administration, and how it will handle “post-election day issues.”
Galvin said Monday he “would have preferred not to have” to effectively put the city into receivership, but he said he saw no other choice.
Galvin said he spoke with Wu shortly after the election last November, but has not personally spoken to her since.
“I just don’t have the level of confidence in the administration in the city to say, ‘We hope for the best,’” Galvin said. “The voters' rights have to take precedence.”
City councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy, who urged Galvin to put the department under state receivership in November, applauded the secretary’s decision Monday. In a statement, Murphy called it a “critical” step toward “overhauling Boston’s election practices and safeguarding the integrity of our democratic process.”
“Now is the time for significant changes and positive leadership at the City of Boston Election Department,” Flynn said in a separate statement.
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.