Mayor Bill de Blasio had good intentions.
That was the mayor's response Friday morning when asked about his administration's bungled civic engagement campaign, which sent thousands of letters to voters across the city this week warning them that their registration status was inactive.
The letters, sent to 400,000 New Yorkers, encouraged voters to check their registration status just weeks before the November primaries, and days before the registration deadline. At least 30,000 letters were also sent in error, City Hall said this week — after initially blaming the Board of Elections for compiling a bad list.
The mistake caused a brief panic among some voters, who then flooded the Board of Elections wondering if there was a voting scam underway.
De Blasio acknowledged Friday that the city had mismanaged the effort — the first spearheaded by the recently created “Democracy NYC” office, which de Blasio created as part of his push to increase civic involvement.
“There is no question that this was a good idea where there was a problem in the execution,” de Blasio said Friday during his weekly appearance on "The Brian Lehrer Show. "
“With the information that I have today, 8 percent of the names should not have been on that list, but if that proves to be true in the end, that means 92 percent of the names were people that needed to be reached out to,” he said.
The city paid upward of $20,000 for a list of names from third party software vendor Civis Analytics, which procured the list from the Board of Elections. In the days since the letter was sent, there was confusion about how the list was compiled, procured and ultimately used by the city.
Civis issued a statement this week saying there was nothing wrong with the database it compiled, instead saying a filtering of the information, which was handled by City Hall, had caused the problem.
On Thursday, aides to the mayor sought to take responsibility for the error but insisted the city had worked with Civis to filter the list.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated how much New York City paid Civis Analytics. The city paid upward of $20,000.