Now that we have removed Silver and Skelos, we have to remove their partners in crime. Let's start with the Board of Elections.
ELECTIONS BOARD REHIRES VOTE-SCANDAL OFFICIAL
Betsy Combier
Editor, COURTBEAT
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| Ben Gershman said the Board of Elections told him he shared initials with another man in the Bronx. |
KEW GARDENS — A voter who registered six months ago after moving to the city says he was tossed off the voter list because his name is similar to a man who lives in The Bronx, he said.
Ben Gershman, 27, registered at the Department of Motor Vehicles after moving to Ridgewood from Chicago six months ago, he said.
But when he checked last month, his name was nowhere on the voter list — because it matched someone else in another borough, the Board of Elections told him.
"They told me I shared the same initials as a voter in the Bronx, it confused both registrations and I had become de-registered," he told DNAinfo New York.
Gershman spent hours Tuesday morning at the Board of Election office location on Queens Boulevard, driving there after realizing he wouldn't be able to vote, he said.
He finally voted after receiving a court order that allowed him to return to his Ridgewood poll site to cast a ballot.
"It's insane what I have to do, and I am registered," he said. "There's no accountability in the election process."
A spokeswoman with the Board of Elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Gershman's voting issues or any other problems at the polls today.
MISTAKES WERE MADE
04.19.16 7:10 PM ET
Failure, Fraud and More In New
York’s Punk Rock Voting Disaster
Voters across New York are telling horror stories about
their inability to cast a ballot because of everything from broken voting
machines to clerical errors over shared middle names.
Alba
Guerrero was dumbfounded. She’d arrived at her polling place in Ozone Park,
Queens only to be told that she had been registered as a Republican since 2004.
That
was news to her. She remembers registering to vote for the first time as a
Democrat so she could vote for Barack Obama in the general election in 2008.
When she recently moved from Manhattan to Ozone Park, in Queens, she
re-registered at the DMV, she says, and even checked online on March 9th to be
sure she was registered at her new address.
But
when she showed up to vote for Bernie Sanders at PS63 on Tuesday, she says she was told she couldn’t. New York
is a closed primary, where only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic
Primary—and voters had to be registered by last October. She was told—very
politely, she wants to make clear—by poll workers to take it up with a judge.
She was given a court order in nearby Forest Hills.
Guerrero drove to the Queens
County Board of Elections and pled her case, but Judge Ira Margulis initially
turned her away.
“The judge tells me, ‘No, that’s
it—2004.’ He shows me, I’m registered as a Republican. He says there’s nothing
we can do,” she said.
But on her way out she saw a Board
of Elections worker holding something with her name on it. It was her 2004
voter registration, replete, she remembers, with her name, her social security
number, her birthday—and someone else’s signature.
“I said, ‘Excuse me, that’s not my
signature,’” she said. “It’s not my handwriting. It showed completely different
signatures.”
Sure enough, the signatures are
strikingly different. Next to a box checked “Republican,” her 2004 signature is
written in clear, deliberate, legible cursive and includes her middle name. Her
more recent signature is a loopy, illegible scrawl. She insists she’s never
changed it in her life, and says she can produce old tax forms to prove it.
So Guerrero went back to to Judge
Margulis and showed him the discrepancy.
“He allowed me to change for that
day,“ she said.
Guerrero’s voting nightmare had a
happy ending. She says the people working the polling stations were incredibly
helpful, and she was able to drive back and forth with her car and a lot of
sticktoitiveness. But voting in New York’s primaries on Tuesday posed many
unsolvable problems for would-be voters—from polling places that opened late to
broken voting machines.
"We are deeply disturbed by
what we’re hearing from polling places across the state. 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," Bernie Sanders campaign spokesperson Karthik
Ganapathy told The Daily Beast.
"We need to be making it
easier for people to vote, not inventing arbitrary obstacles—and today’s
shameful demonstration must underline the urgent importance of fixing voting
laws across the country."
The many messes drew rare national
attention to the sad sate of voting in New York City, where broken machines,
erroneous counts and worse are commonplace experiences.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who tweeted
at 11:50 a.m., “There’s nothing more punk rock than voting. #GetOutAndVote”,
had to change his tune by the end of the day. WNYC reported this morning that
126,000 Brooklyn Democrats had been removed from
the voting rolls since last fall.
“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,” he said in a statement released after 5 p.m. on
Election Day. “I am calling on the Board of Election to reverse that purge and
update the lists again using Central, not Brooklyn borough, Board of Election
staff.”
Bernie Sanders supporters took to social media sites like
Twitter and Reddit to decry what they believed to be rampant irregularities at
polling places. On the largest subreddit dedicated to his campaign, users
compiled a “Voting irregularities and issues megathread” that boasts over 1,700
posts and hotline numbers for voters who believe they have been
disenfranchised.
A spokesperson for New York
Attorney Eric Schneiderman told the New York Daily News that his office
received “by far the largest volume of complaints we have received for an
election since Attorney General Schneiderman took office in 2011.”
Some polling sites did not open on
time, citing too few
election workers. Others had faulty voting machines, or were delivered half the
number of promised voting machines.
Then there are the extraordinary
examples, like Guererro’s and Ben Gershman’s.
Gershman met Guerrero and took a
cell phone video of her competing signatures at the Queens County BOE. He had
arrived there to fight for his right to vote, also for Bernie Sanders.
He had checked his status two
weeks before the registration deadline online to see if he was, in fact,
registered to vote in the primary in Queens. He had registered at the DMV when
he moved to Queens six months ago, but there was a hangup: There was a man in
the Bronx with the same name and a shared middle initial, and he wasn’t
registered to vote as a Democrat.
So Gershman repeatedly emailed the
Board of Elections in the last few days to sort it out (he forwarded those
emails to The Daily Beast to verify his story), and received assurances that he
would be able to vote from various BOE workers.
Still, Gershman arrived at his
polling place at 7:45 a.m. today to find that he could not vote and that he,
too, would have to drive to Forest Hills to appeal for his right to vote.
By the end of it, Gershman didn’t
get to work until 12 p.m., but—three car rides later—he did get to vote for his
candidate.
“I spent three hours this morning
trying to vote,” he said. “I’m at a loss for words. I don’t understand that in
the 21st century you have to stand in front of a judge to get to vote. It was
laughable.”
Gershman was peeved by what
happened to him, but he wonders what would’ve happened if he didn’t have a car,
or the ability to miss a morning of work to fight for his ballot. And he’s also
confounded by what happened to Guerrero’s voter registration form, which he
shared on YouTube and calls “pretty clear fraud.”
Guerrero calls the whole incident
“creepy.” She has “no idea” who might want to forge her signature on a voter
registration form.
“It’s just disheartening. We’re
supposed to be the number one country in the world, but things like this you’d
imagine would happen in a second or third-world country,” she said. “What
happened to me, basically, was fraud.”
Repeated calls to the New York
City Board of Elections went unanswered at press time.
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