West Siders Go to the Polls
By Dan Rivoli
Most of the races West Siders will be voting for are foregone conclusions.
Democrats are expected to trounce their Republican opponents in the two Senate races and Andrew Cuomo is a lock for governor. Locally, state legislators will walk into a new two-year term. Read more
CUNY LAUNCHES VOTE DRIVE
By Dan Rivoli
CUNY launched a voting drive aimed at battling apathy among young voters and students.
CUNY students are encouraged to wear their school’s colors and apparel to the polls. The university system got Barnes & Noble to give students a 25 percent discount on collegiate apparel to help. Campus stores are giving out “CUNY VOTES” buttons every day until the election. Faculty members have been recruited to encourage students to vote Nov. 2.
Easy to Tamper with Electronic Votes?
To the Editor:
Are the voting machines being used by the city proprietary? Inherently, any and all proprietary voting systems eliminate the right to vote, which requires public scrutiny of the elections. That’s why Australia rejected proprietary voting systems, and requires Open Source voting systems, owned by no single entity. Australia felt the voters should be able to protect their right to vote, and not be forced to vote on systems that eliminate public scrutiny and utilizes a secret vote count. Did these questions get answered? Did the city council inform the public on the findings of Australia from back in 2000? Will the report coming out in December address the voters’ right to public scrutiny of the elections?
Tom Poe
Upper West Side
Brewer Leads Hearing on Voting Snafus
City Council members demanded answers from the city’s Board of Elections Monday, Oct. 4, regarding its handling of the Sept. 14 primary. New optical scan voting machines were debuted during that election, causing headaches for some voters.
During the hearing, poll workers and public interest groups voiced their concerns about voter privacy, late poll site openings and quality of worker-training to Gale Brewer, the Upper West Side Council member who chairs the Government Operations Committee. Read more
COUNCIL TO HEAR VOTING PROBLEMS
By Dan Rivoli
Council Member Gale Brewer will lead a hearing Oct. 4 at 10 a.m. on the problems voters had with the new machines during the Sept. 14 primary.
Upper West Siders and voters throughout the city reported that the new optical scanning machines were malfunctioning and polling places were opening late.
That prompted Mayor Michael Bloomberg to call the situation a “royal screw-up.”
On primary day, Brewer, who chairs the Government Operations Committee that oversees the Board of Elections, promised hearings on the problems.
“We have, citywide, pages and pages of complaints,” Brewer said. “The point of the hearing is to prevent these challenges and problems on Nov. 2 [the general election].”
VOTING EXPRESS LANE
To the Editor:
“Vote Here.” Why? Arriving at the East 74th Street polling place by 7 a.m. on Election Day, I waited in a sweaty line for 40 minutes to “have my say.” Next year, I shall apply for an absentee ballot, which I can fill out leisurely at home and mail in. (Don’t tell anyone.)
Ruth A. Unterberg
York Avenue
Letters have been edited for clarity, style and brevity. Read more
LONG WAIT NOT A PROBLEM
At 3 p.m. on Election Day, the line of voters at St. Paul & St. Andrew’s Methodist Church, on West 86th Street, filled an entire block. Voters, many on cell phones or reading magazines, waited patiently as they moved from the end of the line on Broadway to the church’s entrance on West End Avenue.
According to a member of Community Free Democrats, who had spent several hours handing out flyers near St. Andrew’s, the line had been consistently long all day.
Over at the Mickey Mantle School on West 82nd Street, the line was much shorter, but poll worker Marcella Smalls said that the morning had been very busy. Voters started lining up at the school at 5:30 a.m., half an hour before polls in New York City opened.
“We had to let them in before we even finished setting up,” said Smalls, who has been a poll worker for 17 years.
Nothing could deter Upper West Sider Ilene Marcus from voting.
“I walked on crutches to get here,” said Marcus, who came with her mother and daughter.
Luckily for Marcus, there was room to sit while she was waiting her turn. Had she waited, Marcus might have had to stand, as election officials were expecting the polling site to be standing-room-only later that evening.
“It usually doesn’t get busier until the end of the night,” said a poll worker at the door.
PULLING THE RED LEVER TO THE RIGHT, ONE LAST TIME
They looked like vertical metallic coffins, more than 2,200 voting machines lined up in rows in a Red Hook warehouse on the last Wednesday before Election Day.
After 100 million voters yanked the machine’s distinctive red lever, the relic-in-waiting stood ready for what could be their final tour of duty in service to democracy—a tour that began when Robert Wagner Jr. was mayor in 1962. Read more
