There are now two investigations of the Board of Elections.
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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s voter complaint hotline received more than 1,000 complaints throughout the day, Schneiderman’s office said in a statement.
Schneiderman’s probe will focus initially on New York City, where city officials complained of a last-minute purge of the voter rolls in Brooklyn that weeded out almost 120,000 previously registered voters. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and his campaign cried foul Tuesday after more than 125,000 New York City Democrats were purged from the city’s voting rolls.
Stringer also opened an online portal to solicit information from voters regarding their experiences trying to vote.
“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 the voting lists”, de Blasio said.
Stringer, in announcing his audit, said the BOE “hasn’t functioned well for a very long time”. Such a blanket order would effectively make the NY primary an open one, according to ThinkProgress.
This meant, quite literally, that any nearby resident whose last name began with a letter in the second half of the alphabet could not vote in the New York State primary election until the BOE printed out a new book around 10 a.m.
Stringer said “politicians from both parties come together and run an agency like it’s a backroom Tammany Hall political club”.
Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan told WNYC that Brooklyn officials were between six months and a year behind on updating the electoral rolls because of the local elections held across the city in November.
Ryan then blamed much of the confusion yesterday on a concerted effort by people that he believed were attempting to protest New York’s closed primary process.
A Brooklyn resident attending college in another city told the Brooklyn Eagle that she was shocked to find out several weeks ago that the Board of Elections had her listed as registering to vote in another town, thus being ineligible to vote in the primary.
Voting problems are reportedly plaguing hundreds of thousands of voters in NY.
While passing out leaflets for Sanders in Brooklyn, Dubnau said he spoke with “dozens” of people who weren’t able to vote because they were registered as independent, some of whom wanted to change their party affiliation but weren’t able to in time for Tuesday’s primary.
There are more than 5 million total active registered Democrats in New York State, as well as more than 500,000 inactive. “We understand that the eyes and ears of the world are truly on New York City today, and it’s understandable”. Early voting would also increase participation rates, they say.
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Delegate-rich NY, the fourth most populous U.S. state, is a big prize for the candidates. “We need a system that allows people to be a part of the process”. “As it is now structured, the statute places an onerous and excessive burden on the voter to prove their eligibility”, says Blaire Fellows, one of the lead attorneys filing the suit.
