The Independent View: NYC’s First Relevant Primary in Decades and the Polls are a Mess

New York voters battled closed polling stations and broken machines Tuesday morning during the New York City’s first relevant Primary in decades.

At PS 73 in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, residents waiting for the polls to open at 6 a.m. were furious that workers couldn’t access keys to the facility. “You can’t vote nor cast any type of ballot. They, the keys to the building, are in a locked box and no one has the key,” Torsha Childs wrote on Facebook. “You can’t even get inside the building, you are being turned away at the door way. WOW !!!” A Board of Elections employee was supposedly on the way, she added.

Voters made the same complaint about shuttered polls at another Brooklyn site, 501 Carlton Ave. not far from the Barclays Center. One woman claimed she waited more than three hours to vote at a Brownsville polling station at PS 332. “I have been here since 5:50 am. Still cannot vote. Machines are not up and there are no paper ballots,” she tweeted.

Another woman fumed on social media after a faulty scanner eliminated her vote. “Am mad as hell for my vote not being counted b/c scanner would not accept ballot, Brooklyn District 30”, she tweeted.

When Jonathan Petersen went to vote at Sunset Park’s Marien-Heim senior center polling station on 4th Avenue, he was shocked to see his deceased mother’s name above his. “All of a sudden, she’s on the voter rolls at my address, where she has never lived,” the shocked 63-year-old said. “I pointed it out to the woman and she wrote deceased next to her name. They didn’t even ask me to prove that she was dead.” Petersen said his mom, Helen, passed away in 2010 and hadn’t voted in more than a decade. He did change her address to his following her death to get any mail she might receive, but said he didn’t think that would automatically register her to vote there. “Is it possible that someone has been voting using her name for a few years?” he wondered.

The New York City Comptroller, Scott Stringer, said hundreds of thousands may be dealing with polling problems on New York’s Primary day. He is going to audit the Board of Election due to the numerous polling problems across the city. “Why is it alleged that 125,000 people have been removed from the voter rolls? Why did 60,000 people receive notices to vote that didn’t have the primary date? Why were people told they were in the wrong polling place time and time again?” Stringer said. “The next president of the United States could very easily be decided tonight and yet the incompetence of the Board of Election puts a cloud over these results.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement he is supporting the comptroller’s audit. “It has been reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors that the voting lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from voting lists. I am calling on the Board of Election to reverse that purge and update the lists again using Central, not Brooklyn borough, Board of Election staff,” de Blasio said. De Blasio added that these errors show that “major reforms will be needed to the Board of Election and in the state law governing it.”

The office for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said it received 562 phone calls and 140 emails with complaints between the hours of 6 a.m. and 3:50 p.m. The Attorney General said it is the largest volume of complaints they have received for a General election since taking office in 2011. The office said they only received 150 complaints in the 2012 general election.

The most common complaint was voters being told they weren’t registered, followed by being told they were not registered with a political party, and the denial of affidavit ballots when requested. Other complaints included lack of privacy, accessibility issues, unclear instruction, and the availability of only blue pens when ballots state they must be marked in black.