NYC Election Day Chaos: City Officials 'Deeply Concerned' Over 'Mass Voter Roll Purging'

See also: Our up-to-the-minute live blog of the 2016 New York State presidential primary results.

NEW YORK CITY, NY — All heck broke loose Tuesday morning at polling locations across the city as New Yorkers lined up to vote in the first primary election to really mean anything in years.

By late afternoon, voter panic and general distrust of the establishment — mostly from the Berners, natch — had become so widespread that three top-ranking city officials, in an effort to calm the masses, intervened with promises to investigate the day's events.

“It has been reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors," NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a 5:30 p.m. statement, "that the voting lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists."

De Blasio called for the NYC Board of Elections (BOE) to bypass its Brooklyn staff and instead instruct its Central staff to thoroughly review the sudden, recent purge of 126,000 Democratic voters from the Kings County rolls.

NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer went a step further — announcing his office would be launching a full-fledged city audit into the BOE.

In a two-page letter to the board's director, Stringer expressed his "deep concern" over "widespread reports of poll site problems and irregularities."

"The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient," Stringer said. "With four elections in New York City in 2016 alone, we don’t have a moment to spare.”

Speaking by phone Tuesday, BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan responded to the Comptroller with a touch of sass.

"If Stringer believes it is a worthy utilization of city funds... we will fully cooperate with any audit that's conducted," he said.

From where Ryan's sitting, though, "Democracy not merely survived today in the City of New York — it thrived."

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams did not share this outlook as of Tuesday evening.

“On a day when all of Brooklyn should be celebrating incredible voter participation at poll sites across our borough, I am troubled over the tens of thousands of our neighbors who have been inexplicably purged from the voter rolls. We cannot abide any obstacle that advances the perception or reality of voter disenfranchisement. The New York City Board of Elections must immediately reverse these errors in advance of June’s congressional primaries, and Comptroller Stringer must expedite the completion of his audit of the agency. Our City has a duty to ensure the BOE is properly funded, staffed, trained, and equipped to run 21st century elections.”

The first signs of doom this Election Day came as reports on Twitter that multiple polling spots had opened one to two hours late. Either that, or they opened on time, but with none of the proper voting protocol in place.

Brownsville resident Angel Desgouttes said her polling location at Public School 332 "did open on time but nothing was available... They were not setup and polling the machines were locked." She said she watched at least 10 people leave in the two hours it took poll workers to get everything up and running.

"It's discouraging, because this is what makes people wanna just leave," she said.

Another woman told Comptroller Stringer that when she showed up to the Williamsburg Community Center at 6 a.m., she was informed by poll workers that they had no idea when the location would open for voting.

Then came even more disturbing reports, of perhaps entire blocks' worth of Brooklyn residents showing up to their designated voting sites — only to find their names weren't on the voter rolls.

At the Bishop Ford Central Catholic High School polling booth in Windsor Terrace, one of two poller's books went missing, the BOE confirmed.

This meant, quite literally, that any nearby resident whose last name began with a letter in the second half of the alphabet could not vote in the New York State primary election until the BOE printed out a new book around 10 a.m.

"Over the course of the day we had quite a few residents of the Lafayette Avenue area who came looking to vote and for some reason their addresses were omitted from the voter registration lists," an unidentified poll worker in Clinton Hill told DNAinfo. "They were pretty active voters, so it was pretty disappointing for them during a key time and a key period to not be able to officially cast their vote in a machine today.”

The result, as widely reported, being that hundreds of New Yorkers, and especially Brooklyn residents, were forced to submit their vote via affidavit — leaving them insecure over whether their vote had really gone through.

Asked if an unusually high number of affidavit-submitted ballots might affect the reliability of Tuesday night's instant election results, Ryan said he had no way of determining the size or influence of the affidavit pile before polls close at 9 p.m.

However, he said, in the case of most individual complaints investigated by the BOE, "the voter who was seeking to vote was not enrolled in the party they were trying to vote in."

Ryan said that overall, he saw an "overreaction" among voters Tuesday, based on a general misunderstanding of "the difference between a general and a primary election."

Campaigners for the Democratic underdog weren't taking any chances, though. They urged NYC voters to report all mischief and malfunction to Bernie Sander's official mischief and malfunction hotline at (347) 379-4298.

"We are deeply disturbed by what we’re hearing from polling places across the state," Karthik Ganapathy, a Sanders spokesman, said in a statement sent to Patch.

"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," Ganapathy said. "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 BOE's executive director, who was admirably still managing to take phone calls from reporters and otherwise not cannonball into an ocean of whiskey by Tuesday at sunset, said he saw no connection between perceived irregularities in the day's voting process and the 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats recently dropped from city voter rolls.

Of those, he said, 12,000 moved out of the borough, 44,000 were moved from the "active" list to the "inactive" list (because the BOE sent them a piece of mail and received it back with a note saying they no longer resided at that address) and 70,000 were declared "inactive" because they failed to vote in two successive federal elections.

"I'm not immediately alarmed by any of that info," Ryan said. "But certainly, we're going to take a look at it."

Lead photo courtesy of Angel Desgouttes