NEW YORK – The New York City Board of Elections “was clearly unprepared for this level of turnout” during weekend early voting, leading to hours-long lines across the city as residents waited to cast. their votes in person, said Mayor Bill de Blasio, urging the board to “make adjustments immediately.”
New York voters waited in long lines for hours to cast their votes on the weekend during early voting in the presidential election. The New York City Board of Elections said 193,915 people voted during early voting on Saturday and Sunday.
De Blasio said Monday that the Board of Elections (known as BOE) needs “this to be a better experience” for all New Yorkers who want to participate in the process.
“The long lines tell people to go home,” the mayor said. “That is simply the reality. Long lines at a polling place discourage voting. They do not encourage it. We have worked very hard over the past few years to … improve the process and make it more accessible.”
De Blasio called on the BOE to immediately increase the number of voting machines and should ensure that staff are available at early voting locations to assist voters. The mayor said there are voting machines on standby for Election Day, but said those machines should also be in use during early voting.
“The Electoral Board must step up,” he said. “This is a historic moment. They must act as if it were a historic moment.”
Also, De Blasio said, the weekend hours for early voting are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but he says that hours should be extended this coming weekend, the last weekend before Election Day.
He also went on to say that voters with special needs should not be waiting in long lines, but should be at the front of the lines to facilitate their voting.
“The solutions are staring us straight in the face,” de Blasio said. “So I’m saying this to the Board of Elections, ‘Let’s make these changes immediately for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who are ready to vote in the next few days for early voting.’ And if the Board of Elections says, ‘no I have the money, ‘let me say that right now New York City will provide the resources. “
The Representative for New York in the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who waited in line for 90 minutes to cast her vote at the Parkchester polling site in the Bronx on Sunday morning, said wait times of long hours in many polling places were unacceptable and a form of voter suppression.
“It was exciting to see how many people who are overcoming this injustice waiting in lines anyway, bringing community supplies, snacks, lawn chairs,” the Democrat said at the site, where voters began arriving at 6 a.m., four hours. before the polls were opened. “We are going to overcome this hurdle, so that we can choose the people who will make sure this is not a problem in the future.”
Although Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday: “I heard there were a large number of people voting, which is very exciting.” On Monday, however, he shared sentiments similar to those expressed by de Blasio.
“I think the New York City Board of Elections did a terrible job. Terrible. And it’s not the first time and I think it would be open to a complete redesign of the New York City Board of Elections system,” Cuomo said during his press conference Monday on the coronavirus, adding: “The New York City Board of Elections kicked the bucket.”
Robert Mujica, director of the state budget, also criticized the New York City Board of Elections saying the state provided millions of dollars in additional funding to the BOE directly for early voting, “but every election – primary, general – the New York City Board of Elections has a different excuse for their rulings. The state provided additional funding. They failed again, as they do on a regular basis … they need to fix themselves, but we provided additional funding. “
The New York City Board of Elections said 93,830 people voted on the first day of early voting on Saturday, nearly double the total number of the nine days of early voting for the June primaries.
Turnout was also high in upstate New York. In Syracuse, voters lined the block in front of a polling place at a community center Sunday morning. Onondaga County Elections Commissioner Dustin Czarny said 8,473 of the county’s 328,052 registered voters had registered at the polls as of 1:45 p.m. Sunday, surpassing the total votes in the first year of early voting in New York in 2019.
In Western New York, the Erie County Board of Elections reported that nearly 15,000 ballots were cast on the first day of early voting on Saturday, or 2.3% of the county’s registered voters. The Monroe County Board of Elections reported that 9,503 voters cast their ballots on Saturday.
In Albany County, 3,472 of the county’s 175,000 registered voters cast their ballots on Saturday, according to the county board of elections. Schenectady County said nearly 3,000 of the county’s 99,000 active registered voters cast their ballots on Saturday.
“Other than seeing some long lines, we had no reports of any severe problems,” Cuomo’s advisor Beth Garvey said at noon Sunday.
Brian Warner, one of hundreds of masked people who stood in long lines at all six Albany County polling places on Saturday, took the wait in stride.
“We line up to buy concert tickets, we line up to buy sports tickets, we line up to go to the movies,” Warner told WTEN at a polling place in Cohoes. “Queuing to vote is not a problem.”
De Blasio said that although early voting came with a high voter turnout and therefore some challenges, it is still a great alternative to vote in presidential elections as he suspects that the city will see massive turnout on the Day of the Elections and encouraged voters to take advantage of early voting.
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