Celeste Katz

But City Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), who has waged a campaign to clean up a board that built a bad rep as a nest of patronage and blundering, had plenty to say.

“The Board of Elections waited until just after the (city) budget agreement was announced to sneak in a raise for top managers, who are already overpaid,” fumed Kallos, who helps oversee the agency as head of the Council’s Governmental Operations Committee.

Kallos said the raise money would have been better spent preparing and running elections to cut down on long lines and head off problems for voters.

“Between refusing to (advertise) for open positions or major meetings, failure to correct for nepotism, and constant overspending, they should be cutting salaries — not raising them,” Kallos said.

Fifteen more city agencies will be required to distribute voter registration forms under a bill to be introduced in the City Council Tuesday. The bill sponsored by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) will require agencies like the NYPD, FDNY, the Human Resources Administration, which handles welfare benefits, and the Department for the Aging, which runs senior centers, to have the forms on hand at offices where they interact with the public.

It's a done deal: City Council Democrats have voted to approve the appointments of three new commissioners to the Board of Elections.

Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), who was among those who grilled the nominees at City Hall and had pushed for a transparent selection process, noted in a statement that the new commissioners had publicly agreed to pursue anti-nepotism reforms at the oft-criticized agency.

"All of this progress was only made possible by a public hearing of the Rules Committee under the leadership of Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and its Chair Brad Lander," Kallos said.

"The Board of Elections has taken the positive step of implementing CityTime to prevent possible fraud, waste and abuse. Executive Director Mike Ryan is showing himself to be the kind of leader we need to clean up the Board of Elections,” Kallos told the News.

“On February 28, Council Member [Vincent] Gentile and I held a hearing to investigate the disturbing Department of Investigations findings on the [Board]," Kallos added.

"This is the first major step we’ve seen resulting from the hearing, and I look forward to many more — including the adoption of an anti-nepotism policy and public postings for jobs.”

In a 20-page rebuttal to the December DOI study, BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan said many of the DOI's reform recommendations are inconsistent with how the Board is forced to operate under state law.

He also chewed out the investigators for sending undercover agents -- a move DOI officials have called a standard procedure in a probe of this nature -- to pose as dead or otherwise disqualified voters, and said in the majority of the cases, the city Board had no way to know the people whose names were used at the polls shouldn't or couldn't vote.