According to CNN today.
New York City (CNN)Bernie Sanders' campaign on Tuesday called reports of voting irregularities in New York state "a disgrace" as local officials rushed to condemn the city Board of Elections for stripping more than 125,000 Democratic voters from the rolls.
"It is absurd that in Brooklyn, New York -- where I was born, actually -- tens of thousands of people as I understand it, have been purged from the voting rolls," Sanders said during an evening campaign rally at Penn State University.
In an email to CNN, Sanders spokesman Karthik Ganapathy called the state's handling of the primary a "shameful demonstration."
"From long lines and dramatic understaffing to longtime voters being forced to cast affidavit ballots and thousands of registered New Yorkers being dropped from the rolls, what's happening today is a disgrace," he said.
Election Justice USA, a voter rights organization, told CNN it will go to Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Wednesday morning as part of an effort to have provisional ballots from voters disenfranchised by the Board of Elections counted before the primary results are certified.
Earlier in the day, a federal judge denied a temporary restraining order filed by the group that would have opened the polls to New York Democrats claiming they were unlawfully listed as Republican or unaffiliated.
A little before the polls here closed at 9 p.m., the polling site coordinator at Brooklyn Borough Hall estimated that about 10% of those who showed up to vote on Tuesday were previously removed by the board of elections. More than 2,800 people had voted at the location.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Hillary Clinton supporter, called for major reforms to the Board of Elections as a series of snafus continued to bubble up, including reports of the errant "purge" in Brooklyn.
"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 in a statement Tuesday calling on the board to "reverse that purge."
"The perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed," he said.
Speaking to CNN on Tuesday night, Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan pushed back against the growing criticism, saying, "We're not finding that there were issues throughout the city that are any different than what we experience in other elections."
Of the 126,000 Democratic voters taken off from the rolls in Brooklyn, Ryan said 12,000 had moved out of borough, while 44,000 more had been placed in an inactive file after mailings to their homes bounced back. An additional 70,000 were already inactive and, having failed to vote in two successive federal elections or respond to cancel notices, were removed.
"Since the eyes and ears of the world are on New York, issues that are relatively routine for any election are receiving greater scrutiny," he added.
In pledging to audit the board, the office of New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer issued a much stricter verdict.
"The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient," he said.
The Clinton campaign had no immediate comment when asked by CNN.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's voter complaint hotline had "received more than 700 complaints from voters across (New York state)" before 4 p.m., Schneiderman spokesman Nick Benson tweeted. The same office, he added, had heard only around 150 on the day of the 2012 general election.
Now why would they purge (in their words) Brooklyn? Any significance there? It’s not like the place where Bernie was born and so he would be expected to have the highest support, right?
And why on Earth would they specifically “purge” voters who haven’t voted in the last two elections even though they’re registered. Couldn’t be because many of these people are poor or millennial and have a distrust with the political establishment, right?
And why would they want to suppress the vote? It’s not like they can lose with election day voting, right?
Well turns out Bernie wins election day voting.
www.huffingtonpost.com/...
But on Election Day — among voters who’ve been present and attentive for each candidate’s commercials, local news coverage, and live events — Sanders tends to tie or beat Clinton.
In fact, that’s the real reason Sanders does well in caucuses.
It’s not because caucuses “require a real time investment,” as the media likes to euphemistically say, but because caucuses require that you vote on Election Dayrather than well before it.
Consider: in North Carolina, Hillary Clinton only won Election Day voting 52% to 48%. Given the shenanigans in evidence during the live voting there — thousands of college students were turned away from the polls due to insufficient identification under a new voter-suppression statute in the state — it wouldn’t be unfair to call that 4-point race more like a 2-point one (51% to 49% for Clinton).
Consider: on Super Tuesday 3, because early voting is always reported first, Clinton’s margins of victory were originally believed to be 25 points in Missouri, 30 points in Illinois, and 30 points in Ohio. Missouri, which doesn’t have conventional early voting, ended up a tie. Illinois ended up with a 1.8% margin for Clinton (after being a 42-point race in Clinton’s favor just a week earlier) and Ohio a 13.8% margin.
Any one of us could do the math there. And yet the media never did.
Consider: in Arizona yesterday, the election was called almost immediately by the media, with Clinton appearing to “win” the state by a margin of 61.5% to 36.1%. Of course, this was all early voting. CNN even wrongly reported that these early votes constituted the live vote in 41% of all Arizona precincts — rather than merely mail-in votes constituting a percentage of the total projected vote in the state — which allowed most Americans to go to bed believing both that Clinton had won Arizona by more than 25 points and that that margin was the result of nearly half of Arizona’s precincts reporting their live-voting results. Neither was true.
In fact, as of the time of that 61.5% to 36.1% “win,” not a single precinct in Arizona had reported its Election Day results.
Indeed, more than two and a half hours after polls closed in Arizona, officials there had counted only 54,000 of the estimated 431,000 Election Day ballots.
So how did Bernie Sanders do on Election Day in Arizona?
As of the writing of this essay (2:45 AM ET), Sanders was leading Clinton in Election Day voting in Arizona 50.2% to 49.8%, with just under 75,000 votes (about 17.3% of all Election Day votes) counted.
The Washington Post had an article up where they tried to argue that Clinton actually wins election day voting. But they came to this conclusion by adding up the Southern States of Super Tuesday where Bernie did not contest (campaign visits, advertising, ground game etc). Since then he has been winning the black vote under 35 and is ahead nationally with the Latino vote.
OK, OK. But surely it can’t get worse, right?
Well turns out, as you read on the CNN article, they’re “purging” places like Brooklyn more where they expect Bernie to have the most support. Well, you can do that to only certain voters as well.
This "error" also benefits Clinton tremendously.
People don't fully understand just how easy it is to write a database script to modify large sets of data in a matter of seconds or less.
Search for independent voters that have recently changed to dem, randomly select a % of them to be changed to lower the delegate loss and still seem on the books so they could tout it as a resounding victory.
But no one could have known before, right.
Wrong. Read this diary, written in DailyKos days before votes were cast.
Yesterday, by pure happenstance, while checking to see that my county had not changed my registration information from Democrat to Independent (yeah, since Arizona I've been paranoid about such stuff) I discovered something that shocked me. The polls where I live will only be open from 12 Noon until 9 PM, making it difficult for many people who work swing shifts to vote.
I checked to see if this was a statewide phenomenon, or limited to the cheapskates on my own local Board of Elections. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that outside of New York City and the counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam and Erie, where the polls will open at 6 in the morning, every other county in New York does not open for voting until Noon. Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, and Putnam counties are all essentially suburbs of New York City. Erie County, which includes Buffalo, is the only outlier in the bunch.
Every other county in New York state will open their polls for voting in the primary six hours later. If you think this doesn't matter, think again. Many poor and lower middle class folks work swing shifts, which will make it much more difficult for them to vote in this critical election. If you think that seems unwarranted and unfair, and smacks of potential voter suppression, well join the crowd.
I called the New York State's official Board of Elections information number, (518) 474-6336, and was basically given the runaround. The woman who answered the phone was nice enough, but she had no answer as to why only the voters in Buffalo and NYC - and its six downstate suburban neighbors - are blessed with SIX more hours in which to vote, compared to everyone else in New York State. She took my name and phone number, and promised that someone with "more knowledge of the reasons why some voters are more equal than others" would call me, but I suspect it will be a cold day in hell before I hear back from them.
Until I learned of this, to my mind, effort to suppress the votes in counties in which millions of people live (yes, Virginia, New York City and its burbs do not equal all of New York state, not by by a long shot), I had no idea that the polling hours would be so restricted across much of the state next Tuesday.
To give you an idea, the total population of the New York state is roughly 20 million people. Of that number, about 12.25 million (2012 estimates) live in the counties listed above where voters get 6 extra hours to vote on Tuesday, April 19th. The means roughly 8 million people reside in the counties where we cannot vote from 6:00 AM until Noon on Tuesday, unlike those more privileged New Yorkers, most of whom live in or around New York City.
This change in voting hours has not been actively publicized to the electorate by the government of New York State or, as far as I know, by the local county board of elections where voting hours have been cut by six hours. I only learned of it by sheer accident.
Now, some may claim there is nothing nefarious going on here. Maybe there is traditionally lower turnout in all these other countries, so that it makes sense to keep the polls open longer in only a lucky few, and cut the hours for everyone else to cast their ballot for the candidate of their choice come Tuesday. Well, to that I can only say this: bullshit.
Last November, Rochester, New York and Monroe county held its local elections for judges, the school board, the county executive, city council and the county legislature. Turnout for such off year elections is always lower than almost any elections we hold around here, because most people only vote when national candidates who spend lot's of money advertising show up. Guess when the polls opened just a few months ago?
Polling hours
All polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday.
If you're not sure where to vote, you can find your polling place at monroecounty.gov/etc/voter or voterlookup.elections.state.ny.us/votersearch.aspx if you live outside Monroe County.
That's right. In an election where turnout was dismal, at only 28% of registered voters, Monroe County still had the polls open for the full traditional hours of 6 o'clock in the morning until 9:00 o'clock at night. Yet, in a presidential primary election in which interest is extremely high in both the Republican and Democratic parties, as demonstrated in a large surge of new registrations, suddenly voting hours are being cut a critical six hours for almost all of us unlucky duckies who live outside New York City and its environs.
This in a year when voter turnout across the country has rivaled that of 2008.
Here’s more from Heavy.com
Technical Problems Prevented Some Voters From Changing Their Party Affiliation Before the Deadline
New York is a closed primary, so you can only vote within the party that you’re registered with. Voters in New York whose party affiliation was dropped were given an extension, through Friday, March 25, to change their party affiliation. Unfortunately, many reported technical issues when trying to change their party affiliation online.
You can go here to see if your registration is active and if you are listed as affiliated with the right party.
Democratic Board of Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner said that any New York voter whose party affiliation was purged or was inactive could re-register by the end of the business day on Friday, March 25, and still be able to vote in the primary, according to a thread on Redditthat’s been tracking the issue.
Registering online was also an option, and one of Heavy’s commenters said that the DMV would accept online registrations if completed before midnight on March 25. Unfortunately, many people reported technical problems with the DMV site on Friday.
If you’re listed as inactive or unaffiliated, you can still change your registration, but it won’t help in time for the primary. A New York voter registration form that you can print is here, provided by the Bernie Sanders campaign, or here. You can find where to drop the form off here, or you can mail in your registration card or change your registration online.
Friday’s primary deadline was only for those registering to vote for the first time or those changing their party affiliation if their affiliation was purged or if they were listed as unaffiliated/inactive. If you were registered as a Republican, for example, you couldn’t change your party to Democrat and vote in the primary. That deadline was in October 2015.
If you are registered to vote in New York, these deadlines may still be applicable to you:
- April 18 – Last day to apply in-person for an absentee ballot
- April 18 – Last day to postmark absentee ballot. It must be received by the local board of elections no later than April 26.
- April 19 – Last day to deliver absentee ballot in-person to local board of elections.
Bernie Sanders is projected to win big in Washington state, but what does this mean for superdelegates who endorsed Clinton? Can they change their minds?
Click here to read more
Many New York Voters Have Reported Problems With Their Voter Registration
It’s looking like New York voters may be seeing problems similar to Arizona.
Shelly Berry shared on Facebook that she had proof her voter registration was fraudulently changed. Her registration was switched from Democrat to unaffiliated and she was told the change was made in 2012. She had the agent at the board of elections office print out the 2012 form and compare it to another form on file that she knew she had filled out. The handwriting was distinctly different.
For example, one contributor on Reddit, @JRHenke, shared that his wife changed from unaffiliated to Democrat in New York last year, long before the October deadline. She went online to check her status and found that she’s now listed as “Not enrolled in a party.”
Another Redditor commented that he and his wife had voted for Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. But the New York website now says that neither of them are registered, even though none of his information had changed. Another person reported that he registered in December 2015, got an approval email, had the voter registration card in his wallet, and online he was being told that he was not registered.
The more you look, the more stories are reported. This person said they had registered as a Democrat in New York in 2010 to vote in the primaries. He’s voted in every election since. Two weeks ago he checked his voter status and everything was fine. He wrote: “Fast forward to last night when I received three phone bank calls asking if I’ve registered, it made me check my eligibility. Guess what? My information was not there.” He went to the county elections office to register again and was told that no one had any idea what had happened.
If you have found that your party affiliation was wrongly changed, consider reporting it to these sources and leave a comment below to let us know:
But this didn’t happen before, right?
Wrong. It happened in Arizona, Iowa, Illinois, and more.
www.dailykos.com/...
But this has got to be illegal, right?
Wrong. Parties are private organizations outside the government.
They’re literally playing with us. They don’t even care about Party Unity. They’re with Her. They always have been. They always will be.