A Long Island school district clerk allegedly tore up ballots and dumped them in a dumpster to rig a local school board election, according to a 51-page petition filed with the state Education Department seeking to overturn the results and potentially bringing criminal charges.

Ballot Destruction Discovery

Hempstead Union Free School District placed clerk April Keys on administrative leave three days after the May 19 trustee election. That evening, District Superintendent Gary Rush discovered an oversized garbage can in her locked office containing stolen 2026 election ballots. Rush immediately secured the office and ordered the locks changed. However, custodian Owen Peters allegedly hauled the evidence to an outside dumpster the next morning while the locksmith worked, according to the petition.

Investigators later recovered the bag from standing water in the dumpster. Inside they found ripped-up cast ballots for both candidates, shredded early mail ballot applications with voters’ names and signatures still visible, and unused ballots mixed with tally sheets. The petition alleges Keys coached Peters to avoid detection, telling him to use a different staircase to evade the security aide who would ask questions.

Suspicious Vote Patterns

Incumbent trustee Victor Pratt won by just 81 votes despite finishing third in machine voting. The probe revealed Pratt captured 87 percent of absentee votes and 55 percent of early mail votes, compared to only 27 percent of in-person machine votes. His challenger Gwendolyn Jackson’s campaign coordinator returned approximately 120 filled early mail ballots to Keys’ office on election night, yet only 79 were counted. The petition provides no explanation for the missing 33 ballots.

District Demands New Election

The Hempstead school district’s attorneys filed the petition on June 15, asking state Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa to order a new election with a replacement clerk and oversight by the state Attorney General’s Civil Rights office. The filing states that widespread irregularities were so pervasive they undermined the entire electoral process. Pratt, a third-term trustee and former school board president who works as a local DJ under the stage name DJ Vic-Lover, now faces potential criminal charges as authorities investigate the alleged election fraud scheme.