The New York City primary was so disastrous that it triggered an investigation
On Tuesday, New York’s presidential primary elections day, many New Yorkers were unhappy.
Tens of thousands of Brooklyn Democrats learned they had been unregistered and wouldn’t be able to vote. And despite efforts to open polls up to Independent voters, the primary remained closed, shutting out those who had been mistakenly purged from the system and any Independents who missed the deadline to re-register as Republicans or Democrats.
As a result, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer will audit the Board of Elections to figure out what went wrong. “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?” He asked, adding, “The next president of the United States could very easily be decided tonight and yet the incompetence of the Board of Elections puts a cloud over these results.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday, that “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,” adding, “the perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed.”