In a disaster for voting rights and democracy — and a horrifying embarrassment for New York — the incompetent New York City Board of Elections inexplicably removed more than 100,000 Brooklyn voters off the rolls amid the national spotlight of a crucial presidential primary.
Tuesday, reports came from across the city, but especially in Brooklyn, of registered Democrats and Republicans being turned away from the polls because, they were told, they were ineligible.
BUNGLED NY PRIMARY VOTING BRINGS BOARD OF ELECTIONS PROBE
That alone would be troubling. Add in the hard fact of enrollment numbers and it screams that something has been rotten in the county of Kings.
Of 62 counties statewide, 61 saw an increase in total voter enrollment since November — including Hamilton County, the smallest in the state.
And then there was Brooklyn — the state’s single most populous county. The borough lost an off-the-charts 8% of its active voters (102,717) and 6.5% of its total voters over that brief period.
INTERACTIVE: NEW YORK PRIMARY RESULTS
Among Democrats, 63,821 voters vanished, 7% of the total. Among the GOP, the carnage was greater: 11,285 voters dropped, 10.1% of the total. You don’t need Donald Trump to proclaim an irregularity this large yuuge.
All this, need we remind you, happened in Brooklyn, home of the Hillary Clinton national headquarters. Brooklyn, boyhood borough of Bernie Sanders. Brooklyn, which has the largest number of all-important congressional districts crucial to both parties’ delegate allocation.
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s voter hotline recorded far more complaints than ever before, with the mess focused in Brooklyn among voters who were no longer listed as being registered.
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Mayor de Blasio, a Brooklyn voter himself, is outraged and demanding answers. City Controller Scott Stringer will run an audit. There already is a class action lawsuit filed in federal court that may be able sort out what happened.
Anyone who has the sad task of chronicling the ineptitude of the city’s Board of Elections knows the root cause of its perpetually amateurish performance. The board, by design, is ruled by party bosses, not professionals.
Year in and year out, this produces chronic waste and inefficiency, with screw-ups and mix-ups as expected as candidates kissing babies, with everything from broken machines to missing machines to inept staff to missing ballots to the wrong ballots.
But unless a credible explanation is in the offing — and damn quick — what happened in Brooklyn is orders of magnitude worse than normal.
Looks like the presidential primary has been botched. Stop the Board before it commits more crimes against democracy.
