Votelaw, Edward Still's blog on law and politics

The Boston Globe reports: A consultant's audit of the Boston Election Department has found that years of understaffing and underfunding have left the department incapable of consistently conducting elections properly.

Even as the demands on election workers increased because of federal voting rights legislation, the city continued to cut the department's budget, forcing it to operate with a skeleton staff and outdated tools, according to the audit conducted by David King, an elections specialist at Harvard University.

The city will not be able to run elections effectively unless it overhauls the department, reclassifying jobs to create clear areas of responsibility and committing to a "sustained investment in personnel and training" that would increase the size of the department's staff by more than a third, King said in a 12-page draft of his conclusions released to the Globe. -- Audit says cuts left Election Dept. unfit - The Boston Globe