Found Calling in Church: Bronx Election Deputy Tosi Ready to Retire

Found Calling in Church
Bronx Election Deputy Tosi Ready to Retire

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS

Long-time Board of Elections employee Victor Tosi, Deputy Chief Clerk in The Bronx for six years, will retire Sept. 15 to spend more time with family and doing ministry duties.

VICTOR TOSI: New life awaits him. Mr. Tosi will be replaced by Dawn Sandow, currently an Administrative Associate in The Bronx office. Ms. Sandow will join Anna Torres, the other Deputy Chief Clerk, in organizing and overseeing elections in Bronx County.

Helping Those in Need

Mr. Tosi said he wasn't ruling out the possibility of occasional consultancy work in the future, but he planned to focus the bulk of his time on his grandchildren, wife and kids, and stepping up his outreach work as a Deacon in the Catholic Church.

"A little over a year ago I was ordained by Cardinal Edward Egan, and since then I've been doing ministry with pregnant women in crisis through the Sisters of Life, with the elderly, [and] high-risk kids on the street, and it's very, very rewarding," Mr. Tosi said Aug. 10.

"You get to the point when you start to think maybe it's time to focus on real things, like family," he continued.

In retiring, Mr. Tosi turned down an opportunity to become a Board of Elections Commissioner - a job that required a background investigation by the City Council. His name was submitted along with several others as a potential nominee.

School Vote Flap

Although the Council rarely blocks appointees, Mr. Tosi might have encountered some difficulties related to his tenure as Personnel Director at The Bronx office. A grand jury report found that while serving as Personnel Director in 1993, Mr. Tosi had a hand in restoring two unqualified candidates to the school-board ballot. Mr. Tosi has denied any wrongdoing.

Mr. Tosi, who was promoted to Deputy Chief in 2000, made significant changes in the borough's headquarters during his tenure.

He said he was proud of the way his team responded on 9/11, which was the day of the 2001 primary elections. The Board of Elections turned around three elections within a subsequent sixweek period to make up for the lost day, including a primary run-off between Democratic contenders Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer.

"I am very proud of the citywide operations that helped make that happen," commented Mr. Tosi. "I'm also happy I'm leaving workers a building that's now got two big freight elevators - we used to have to bring out more than 1,000 voting machines every election through just one elevator - and central heat and air. These things I made sure were brought in for the comfort and convenience of our workers."

Mr. Tosi will step down after the primary elections next month, leaving Ms. Sandow at the helm for the general elections in November, when for the first time some voters will cast ballots on electronic machines.

New York was sued recently by the U.S. Department of Justice for failing to comply with the Help America Vote Act, which mandated that electronic voting machines be used in lieu of old-fashioned lever-pulling ones. The state fell woefully behind its schedule to meet the Federal standards after the State Legislature was unable to decide on a vendor to supply the new equipment.

Making Do

The BOE as a stop-gap measure for the primaries will have electronic machines in each of its borough headquarters for visually-impaired or disabled voters and those with special language needs. All polling sites must be fully equipped with similar machines by 2007, or the state loses millions of dollars in Federal aid.

BOE Executive Director John Ravitz said Mr. Tosi's departure wouldn't disrupt the workflow in The Bronx because Ms. Sandow was already familiar with how things were run.