NYC Board of Elections official suspended amid voting issues

“New York is really notorious in terms of having hard obstacles for voters to surmount in order to vote”, said Horner.

De Blasio said the mistakes happened “across the whole borough” and not just in pockets where Sanders was believed to have strong support, like hipster enclaves Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

The Republican nomination has not been contested this late in the primary season in the last 30 years.

Meanwhile, New York City’s comptroller, Scott Stringer, announced an audit of the Board of Elections over reports of irregularities in Tuesday’s primary. Of course, that feeling is not restricted to NY. For Monroe County, check the Board of Elections website or the state Board of Elections website.

In the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary, broken machines led to a delay in determining a victor because of ballots that had to be counted by hand.

“Since the eyes and ears of the world are on NY, issues that are relatively routine for any election are receiving greater scrutiny”, he told CNN. Certainly the Brooklyn debacle isn’t routine.

“I believe that as an American I should take advantage of the right to vote and have a say in who’s running the country”, Roma said. Bernie Sanders’ birthplace – getting purged from the voter rolls.

A 2010 study by the Pew Center on the States found that 1 in 8 voter registrations in the US – about 24 million records – was invalid or significantly inaccurate.

There were over 900 calls from frustrated voters to the Election Protection Coalition, more than in any other primary state. It also allows them to identify voters who have moved, so they can try to contact them to update their registrations.

More than 125,000 Brooklyn residents were left off the voter’s registration list, according to Stringer, who cited reports of closed polling sites, faulty ballot scanners, misleading voting site notifications and other voting irregularities.

NY has opened an investigation into voting problems in the state’s primary Tuesday, after many voters reported snafus at the polls. Their ire was directed at the Board of Elections, a bipartisan body long accused of mismanagement. “But it’s the city taxpayers who are paying the freight and it’s the city voters who are depending on the Board of Elections to do their job at the highest level of competence”.

“Election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site”, the city watchdog said. In a statement yesterday, de Blasio spoke specifically about the Brooklyn branch of the BOE, and said that errors made by that office “indicate that additional major reforms will be needed to the Board of Election and in the state law governing it”.

The fallout from Tuesday has been undoubtedly negative. While this six- month discrepancy seems excessive, it is a NY state law, and if you cared about voting, you should have been aware. City officials, however, did dodge at least one proverbial bullet: If the outcome of either party’s race had been close, especially on the Democratic side, voters would be even angrier than they already are.