Voters Face Broken Machines And Closed Polling Places In New York

Time and time again, it has been the same story. Primary elections long expected to produce record turnouts quickly ground to a halt by malfunctioning machines and a lack of ballots. Every national election, politicians express outrage only to have the same cycle repeated. New Yorkers are saying that they are facing the same barriers to voting from long lines to broken machines.

There are reports of “hundreds of thousands” of problems and a call for an audit to deal with the gross mismanagement.  This has been one of the most anticipated elections in New York history and yet there are systemic failures being reported across the state, but particularly in New York City.

Voters in Brooklyn are outraged by what they say is the delays and incompetence of the polling places.  That is a disgrace for the De Blasio administration and the election officials. Putting on elections is a basic as it gets in terms of minimal governmental services.  On top of that, there are reports that Republican voters arrived to vote in places like Harlem and were told that they did not have Republican ballots.

In the meantime, some 27 percent of voters will not be able to vote in New York because of its restrictions.

Then there is the vanishing of thousands of voters (though officials insist that the disappearance is due to their general failure to keep update voting records).

The problem is that after such incompetence, no one is usually held accountable. In the meantime, officials use their own poor performance to secure more money for the next election, which seems to follow the very same cycle.