It happened again. A Long Island school district is asking New York education officials to overturn a closely contested board election after accusing its district clerk of removing, shredding, and discarding official ballots in a trustee race decided by just 81 votes.
The Hempstead Union Free School District filed a 51-page petition with the New York State Department of Education on June 15, alleging that district clerk April Keys manipulated the May 19 board of education trustee election to benefit incumbent trustee Victor Pratt, according to The New York Post.
Pratt, a third-term trustee and former board president who also performs locally as a DJ under the name DJ Vic-Lover, won the race despite finishing third in the in-person machine vote. According to the petition, Pratt received 87% of absentee ballots and 55% of early mail votes, while the other candidates combined received fewer than 100 absentee and early mail ballots.
“The Board of Education Trustee election must be overturned because widespread irregularities affected the outcome of the election and were so pervasive that they vitiated the electoral process,” the petition states.
The district is asking Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa to order a new election, appoint a replacement clerk, and place oversight under the state Attorney General’s Civil Rights office.
The district began reviewing the election after discovering major irregularities in the results. Keys was placed on administrative leave three days after the election. Later that evening, Superintendent Gary Rush found an oversized trash bin in her office containing a tied bag of election materials, according to the filing.
Investigators later recovered a bag from a dumpster containing shredded cast ballots for both Pratt and challenger Gwendolyn Jackson. The bag also included early mail ballot applications that still displayed voters’ names, addresses, and signatures, along with unused ballots and tally sheets.
Jackson’s campaign coordinator, identified in the filing as Allah Supreme Mathematics, said he delivered roughly 120 completed early mail ballots to Keys’ office on election night. Only 79 were counted. The petition says no explanation was given for the missing ballots.
Security footage also showed custodian Owen Peters removing a bag from the clerk’s office and taking it to the dumpster. According to the petition, Keys instructed Peters to use a different staircase “because the security aide stationed at the bottom of the staircase by the administrative offices would ask questions and it ‘risked appearing suspicious.’”
The petition also alleges that Pratt visited Keys’ office the night before the election. Surveillance footage showed him arriving with a manila folder and leaving with a stack of as many as 125 absentee ballots. When later confronted with the footage, Pratt said he did not remember having the envelopes, did not know what they were for, and did not know where they were.
The filing further cites evidence of possible forgery. Nine early mail ballot applications appeared to have been written in the same handwriting, according to the petition, and one misspelled the voter’s first name. All nine applications were stamped as received within a three-minute span on May 18, while Pratt was allegedly in the clerk’s office.
The Nassau County District Attorney’s office has received the district’s findings and is investigating whether criminal charges are warranted.
The allegations come as President Donald Trump is pressing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a broader election measure that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and direct states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls. Trump has made the bill a priority, recently tying it to other legislative business by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill until the election measure advances. Although the Hempstead case centers on alleged ballot destruction and insider misconduct rather than citizenship verification, it adds fuel to the larger argument that election systems depend not only on access, but on enforceable safeguards, secure ballot handling, and public trust.
The state Education Department has not yet ruled on the petition. For now, the case stands as a reminder that election security concerns are not limited to national contests. Even local races can turn on a small number of ballots, and when insiders are accused of mishandling them, public confidence depends on a full accounting.
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Hmm – if people are willing to cheat for a local school board election, imagine what lengths they would go to for city, county, state and federal elections. NOT trying to cast stones at any particular group/party nor minimize the importance of school boards by any means but ya gotta wonder why a certain political party fights tooth and nail against any measure that actually helps to insure election integrity. It is ‘almost’ as if they want to cheat.