A New York City Board of Elections official in Brooklyn was suspended on Thursday as city and state officials investigate whether tens of thousands of Democratic voters were improperly removed from voter rolls ahead of the New York presidential primary on Tuesday.
Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the board’s chief clerk in Brooklyn, has been suspended without pay pending the outcome of an internal investigation into the handling of voter rolls, the board said in a statement on Thursday. Her suspension was reported on Thursday by The Daily News.
The board performance during the presidential primaries on Tuesday was the subject of complaints by voters who said they faced difficulties trying to cast ballots. Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday that voters and voting-rights monitors had reported the “purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists.”
More than 125,000 Democratic voters in Brooklyn were dropped from the rolls between November 2015 and this month, while about 63,000 others were added, officials said.
Michael J. Ryan, executive director of the elections board, has said that each year thousands of names are added and removed from voting rolls, and that he believed that “no voters were disenfranchised.”
The reports of irregularities have nonetheless prompted Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, to open separate inquiries.
In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Schneiderman said that the “administration of the voter rolls in Brooklyn is of major concern to our office and is a focus of our investigation.”
The elections board said it would cooperate with the investigations.
Efforts to reach Ms. Haslett-Rudiano on Thursday were unsuccessful.
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