I live in NYC so I'm just angry. If I lived in a swing state I'd be really freak out. I changed my voting address months ago and got a card from the board of elections saying they had moved me within the city. I was registered in a new election district. Ok, fine. I got up and out by 6:15am this morning and met a huge line near central Park. I stood in line for about an hour and when I got to the table, I wasn't on the books.
After going to Pennsylvania canvassing and doing GOTV to not be able to vote myself is pretty upsetting.
This is from an article I saw in The New York Daily News a couple of days ago:
..two men.. will be to blame if Tuesday's historic, high-interest presidential election becomes a debacle of long lines and eligibility foulups for New York City voters.
Their names are Frederic Umane (top) and Marcus Cederqvist
For months, they have had the gall to tell Mayor Bloomberg, in effect, to go to hell when top aides sought to check on whether the board, an independent agency, would be prepared to run an election with the highest participation in memory.
Obviously they were not prepared.
I would like to know how many more of us have to file provisional ballots. I also want to know if I'm still registered downtown, but I can't vote twice so even if I am, I'm screwed.
The Daily News article went on to say:
Umane, secretary to the board, and Cederqvist, executive director, have also led the 10-member panel in rejecting every good idea from City Hall. Those included basics like putting a sample ballot on the board's Web site, properly training poll workers and recruiting supplementary poll workers from good-government groups.
So, thanks to the board's failure to plan for a predictable surge in voter registrations, the city appears on the verge of an electoral nightmare.
I'm so pissed off right now, I have some fantasy of suing these two guys personally for disenfranchisement (I don't really think I can do that.)
Ok, so I got disenfranchised - I guess. (I don't fully understand how they determine a provisional ballot is valid or whether they even really count it.)
Anyway, I have always believed that the reason New York is a very "safe" blue state is because of democratic voting in New York City. I have always thought that the "up-state" part of the state was markedly more conservative.
This may be an urban myth. Maybe Rochester and Syracuse are democratic strongholds. I don't know. But after getting purged, and in the context of the Daily News article I truly hope we are not depending on NYC for those democratic votes to keep this state blue. I can't be the only one with this problem.