Voters receiving the wrong ballots, poll sites opening late, broken voting machines, absentee ballots missing and more.
These are some of the complaints already surfacing as New Yorkers head to the polls Tuesday to cast a ballot in the presidential, state, and local primary elections.
At J.H.S. 190 Russell Sage in Forest Hills, Queens, several voters said poll workers only gave them one of the two ballot pages they are supposed to get. One ballot is for the presidential primary, and the other is for local races.
“They actually needed to demand it,” Ethan Felder, a Democratic candidate for district leader in Forest Hills, told Patch.
Felder, who learned of the issue from two voters outside the school early Tuesday, notified the NYC Board of Elections but said the official who showed up at the polling site was “dismissive and hostile.”
“It made me lose more faith in the BOE,” Felder said, using an acronym for the agency. “The approach was, ‘you’re just causing trouble here.'”
Some poll sites didn’t open according to schedule, while others didn’t have functioning equipment.
A voter on City Island in The Bronx told Patch that his local polling place, P.S. 175, didn’t open until 8 a.m. — two hours late.
At Lenox Road Baptist Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn, voters reportedly waited two hours to cast their ballot because both scanners were broken. They left their ballots in a lockbox to get scanned later.
Dozens of voters — many of whom said they are at high risk for COVID-19 — reported to the Board of Elections Twitter account that they never received absentee ballots.
BOE data from on June 17th, analyzed by Gothamist, show nearly 95 percent of people who applied for absentee ballots received one, leaving about 30,000 people without.
BOE data from on June 17th, 2020, analyzed by Gothamist, show nearly 95 percent of people who applied for absentee ballots received one, leaving about 30,000 people without.
Would-be absentee voters have been told to direct message @BOENYC with their name and address to find out the status of their requests.
Spokespeople for the NYC Board of Elections and the New York Attorney General’s Office, which runs a hotline to help voters with election issues, did not immediately respond to Patch’s requests for comment Tuesday.
Read the entire article here.
Editor’s Note: As of this writing we have not heard that Harlemites have been experiencing the same drama.
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