Months after putting Boston’s election department into receivership, Secretary of State William F. Galvin said his staff has sought to “insulate” the agency from Mayor Michelle Wu’s office amid her reelection run — one in a slew of changes officials say they’ve pursued in a bid to restructure how the city runs its vote.
City and state officials alike said Boston voters should feel confident in the department’s ability to handle the Sept. 9 preliminary election, which offers the first test of Election Day administration since a spate of high-profile failures last fall prompted Galvin to intervene.
“It’s been a much more intensive exercise than I envisioned,” Galvin said of his office’s involvement. “There are internal things that suggest there could be bigger problems.”
Perhaps the most noticeable shift for voters will be the city’s move to distribute tablets, known as “poll pads,” to each precinct, giving poll workers the real-time ability to look up a person’s voter registration information and connect directly with the city’s election department. The tablets have been used since 2016 for early voting; the expansion across the city for Election Day cost $725,000, city officials said.
The city has also created a dedicated line with dozens of volunteers for poll workers to call with Election Day problems, and a separate “situational awareness room” of senior staff to triage issues as they arise. Last year, precincts struggled with ballot shortages. This year, the city plans to distribute enough to cover 110 percent of registered voters, Boston’s election commissioner said.
Also behind the scenes: Given Wu’s reelection run against Josh Kraft and two other challengers — community activist Domingos DaRosa and perennial candidate Robert Cappucci — Galvin said department staff should be “responding to us, because we’re not involved in the mayoral election.”
“We’ve insulated the process,” Galvin said, adding that those in Wu’s office who had supervisory roles of the election department are “not the parties that are answered to now.”
“The mayor’s office is not running the election department,” he said. “I am.”
Galvin, a Brighton Democrat, stressed that he “is not accusing [Wu] of anything.” But he said change was necessary after the 2024 presidential election, when city officials sent too few ballots to poll locations, then failed to answer scrambling poll workers’ calls to the election department. Boston police cruisers, lights and sirens blaring, had to speed additional ballots to precincts around the city.
“We want it to work. And we want it to work without any big deal or any big problem,” Galvin said of this year’s election. “Clearly, back last November, they didn’t aggressively deal with the problem. That’s why it ended up the way that it did.”
Eneida Tavares, Boston’s election commissioner, said Galvin’s office has been a “partner” with the city. She deferred questions about Wu’s involvement to her office.
“The election department runs the election, but it really takes the entire city to pull off an election,” Tavares said inside a first-floor room in City Hall that’s doubled as a training room for poll workers.
Emma Pettit, a Wu spokesperson, did not directly address Galvin’s comment, but said in a statement that the city is “grateful . . . for [Galvin’s office’s] support in modernizing and accelerating needed improvements” inside the department. She also noted that Wu this year shifted the agency from under the city law department to its so-called City’s People Operations and Administration Cabinet, which, among other duties, handles human resources.
Wu’s office brought in an outside firm, the Elections Group, to review the elections department’s operations. Tavares said that helped identify “each level where we failed and . . . where all the gaps were.”
Galvin said his office discovered a series of other bureaucratic issues since it became involved. The department, for example, sent multiple ballots to voters who had requested to vote early by mail, an issue Tavares said was limited to “a little over” 100 residents.
Other internal issues were more minor: The physical cases workers used to transport blank ballots to polling sites were, in some cases, too small, Galvin said. In one instance, he said, city officials put money in the wrong account when trying to pay a printer. Galvin said he then had to deal with the vendor directly.
Galvin said his first deputy, Michelle Tassinari, has become “involved in this on almost a daily basis,” in addition to Michael Sullivan, the former head of the state’s campaign finance regulatory agency, whom Galvin tapped to be the election department’s receiver. (Tavares said Sullivan, who lives in Newburyport, is in the office a “couple times a week.”)
The city emerged from last fall’s bumpy election with a list of problems. Galvin’s office confirmed complaints that polling locations in the city didn’t receive enough ballots during November’s election, an issue it said then “cascaded into a more systemic problem” when city officials missed or didn’t return calls from poll workers.
State law requires that city officials provide polling locations with at least one ballot for each registered voter. But, Galvin’s office found, city elections officials “unilaterally” decided to distribute only enough ballots last November to cover 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.
Then, because of what Galvin’s 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.
The communication lapses compounded the problem. 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 — 1,205 — went unanswered, according to data from city officials.
In all, of the 15,778 calls the Election Department fielded on Election Day last year, a little more than 2,000 were “not connected.” City officials told Galvin’s office that the phone lines were “simply overwhelmed,” but Galvin called it a management problem.
It’s a problem city officials are seeking to avoid by creating the separate line for poll workers to call and staffing it across Election Day with three shifts of 25 volunteers in addition to the department’s full-time staff. The poll pads, transported in lime green boxes and synced to the department’s central reporting system, will also allow workers to receive and send text messages directly with the central office.
City Councilor Ed Flynn, who last year had urged Galvin to put the department under state receivership, said he’s “still concerned” about whether the department can manage the election. He said that even with the state’s involvement, he believes the agency should report directly to the mayor.
“When there’s ballot shortage, delays, lack of preparation, that means residents have lost faith in the city’s ability to provide basic city services,” Flynn said.
Tavares said she’s confident the election will be “successful,” and Galvin said residents “can be confident about their vote being cast.”
How soon they’ll learn who topped the field is another question; four years ago, the city didn’t publish unofficial results in that November’s election until 14 hours after polls closed.
“I’m hopeful [the changes] will lead to a quicker result,” Galvin said. “But as important as it is to get a result as soon as possible, it’s more important that it’s accurate.”
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.