New York had many problem voting for April 19th: polling places didn’t open on time, voting machines malfunctioned, and voters showed up to find their names weren’t on the rolls.
Some voters had their party affiliations mysteriously switched from Democratic or Republican to independent or non-affiliated and couldn’t vote in the closed Primaries. And 3 million New Yorkers, 27 percent of the electorate, didn’t get to vote because they weren’t registered with the Democratic or Republican parties, and the deadline to change party affiliation was an absurd 193 days before the April 19 Primary, on Oct. 9, 2015.
As a result, only 19.7 percent of eligible, active, New Yorker voters cast a ballot, the second-lowest voter turnout among Primary states after Louisiana, according to Elections Expert Michael McDonald. There were over 900 calls from frustrated voters to the Election Protection Coalition, more than in any other Primary state.
These problems could have been avoided if New York had electoral reforms like same-day voter registration and early voting. Comptroller Stringer recently proposed a number of good policies that would make it easier to vote and have been introduced in the New York legislature. Hopefully the problems in the Primary will lead to legislative action.
Moreover, Brooklyn’s voter purge could have been stopped if the Supreme Court had not gutted the Voting Rights Act, since Kings County was one of the jurisdictions that had to approve its voting changes, preclearance, with the Federal government based on a history of voting discrimination. Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan were covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1970, because they had English-only literacy tests dating back to 1921 and very low turnout among minority voters.
In 2013, New York urged the Supreme Court to preserve the VRA. “The benefits of Section 5 greatly exceed the minimal burdens that Section 5 may impose on States and their political subdivisions,” it wrote in an amicus brief.
Instead, we’ve seen problems across the country in the first Presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the VRA, from five-hour lines in Arizona’s Maricopa County, to voters turned away from the polls in North Carolina to last-minute voter purges in Brooklyn.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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