Wrong Ballots, Broken Machines: Voting Issues Plague NYC Primary

NEW YORK CITY — Sun Hee and Seo Jun Kim showed up at their Flushing poll site bright and early Tuesday morning to cast their vote in their local primary elections, but when they received their ballots, they realized something was missing.

The candidate they'd been so eager to vote for — their son, state Assembly Member Ron Kim — wasn't listed.

The Kims are among an untold number of New York City voters who reported receiving incomplete or incorrect ballots Tuesday.

Yet even that was just one item on a laundry list of issues voters faced in their quest to cast a ballot in the presidential, state and local primary elections. Scanning machines were broken. Poll sites opened late — in one case, by nearly four hours — and were understaffed. Workers weren't supplied with protective equipment. Requested absentee ballots never arrived in the mail.

The NYC Board of Elections didn't respond to Patch's request for comment, but, in an article in the New York Times, spokesperson Valerie Vazquez-Diaz acknowledged "isolated" problems and blamed poll sites' late openings on the subway closures from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Polls were supposed to open at 6 a.m.

Kim, who faces a primary challenger for his Assembly seat representing Flushing, said his parents were among dozens of voters at J.H.S. 189 who never received both pages of their ballot. One page is for the presidential primary, and the other is for local races.

When his parents complained, the poll site supervisor claimed she was just following orders from the Board of Elections, Kim said in a phone interview.

It was the same story at a polling place at NYCHA's Bland Houses in Flushing, where voters were only getting the ballot for the presidential primary, not the local primary races.

“It seems like there’s some kind of coordinated effort to suppress the voters," Kim said.

At J.H.S. 190 Russell Sage in Forest Hills, Queens, several voters reported not receiving the ballot for local races, like the congressional primary for the seat held by U.S. Rep. Grace Meng.

“They didn’t seem to know where the other one was," Alisa Tippie, a volunteer poll watcher for Meng's campaign, said of the poll workers there. "I had to have them hunt down for it.”

The polling site was also understaffed, and poll workers had to use their own face masks and hand sanitizer, according to Tippie — even though polling places were supposed to have supplies of personal protective equipment.

Ethan Felder, a Democratic candidate for district leader in Forest Hills, notified the NYC Board of Elections about the ballot issue but said the official who showed up at the polling site was "dismissive and hostile."

“It made me lose more faith in the BOE," Felder said. "The approach was, 'you're just causing trouble here.'”

In Brooklyn, congressional candidate Paperboy Love Prince, who is challenging Rep. Nydia Velazquez, said he didn't receive the ballot for his own race.

Prince said he only received a one-page presidential ballot without any local or state races, yet poll workers told him the ballot was correct.

"They were so adamant about it I almost believed them," he said. "Then I thought, 'I’m a candidate in the district. I should be on the ballot.'"

A poll worker finally found a stack of ballots with Prince's race, and others, on it. Prince said he's since heard about similar issues across the city.

"At least 100 people have reached out with issues related to their voting," he said. "And it’s only 1 p.m."

On Manhattan's Lower East Side, campaign staffers for Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou heard that a voter at a 200 Madison St. polling site was given only a presidential primary ballot before she asked specifically for the local race sheet.

Niou's staff members also had to call in their election lawyer to investigate why voters found a polling site at 266 East Broadway closed Tuesday morning, one of several that didn't open according to schedule or didn't have functioning equipment.

The Broadway site was finally up and running by 10:45 a.m., nearly four hours after it was scheduled to open, Niou's communications director, Meredith Starkman, told Patch.

"We had about 10 folks who waited and waited and weren't able to vote because of this closure," Starkman said.

By 3 p.m., the Board of Elections still hadn't explained why the site was closed in the first place.

"The BOE is radio silence," she said. "We have heard absolutely nothing."

A voter on City Island in The Bronx told Patch that his local polling place, P.S. 175, didn't open until 8 a.m. — two hours late.

At Lenox Road Baptist Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn, voters reportedly waited two hours to cast their ballot because both scanners were broken. They left their ballots in a lockbox to get scanned later.

Wait times also stretched two hours long at LeFrak City in Queens, where a poll site coordinator had asked for additional workers. Reinforcements arrived only after Acting Borough President Sharon Lee intervened Tuesday evening.

The problems aren't limited to in-person voting: Nearly 30,000 voters who requested an absentee ballot had not yet received theirs as of last week, according to Gothamist.

Some voters, including some who are at high risk if they contract COVID-19, complained Tuesday that they never received a ballot to vote by mail.

A spokesperson for the New York Attorney General's Office, which runs a hotline to help voters with election issues, told Patch the overwhelming majority of calls and emails have been from voters who applied for absentee ballots but had not received them.

About 765,000 absentee ballots were mailed to New York City voters, according to the Board of Elections. Of those, just under 93,000 had been returned as of Tuesday.

Asked about the voting issues during a Tuesday morning news briefing, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he hadn't received enough reports to get an "overview" of the situation but acknowledged New Yorkers' distrust in the agency that oversees the city's elections.

Year after year, New Yorkers "assume" there will be election problems, de Blasio said.

"I don't think the Board of Elections should continue in its current form," he said. "The way it’s set up right now isn’t effective enough."

Patch editors Matt Troutman, Kathleen Culliton and Anna Quinn contributed reporting.