After numerous reports of voters being denied access to the polls on Tuesday’s primary elections in New York, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has an announced an investigation into New York’s Board of Elections to discover the cause of the problems.
During the primary, Schneiderman set up a hotline for voters to report any issues, with the number of reported calls reaching into the thousands. According to Schneiderman, this represented a 368 percent increase in issues over the number of reported problems during 2012’s general election.
While new voters certainly had their share of problems, they weren’t alone. Many reports came in to various outlets of voters being removed from the registry despite having been registered with their respective party for decades. Perhaps most troubling, Brooklynn found that over 120,000 voters had been removed from the rolls, which Mayor DiBlasio has since demanded an explanation for.
To add further complications to the primary results, New York comptroller Scott Stringer is now seeking a full audit of the New York Board of Elections. Public support has mounted for not only the audit, but a public review of the audit afterwards, with a petition already generating thousands of signatures. With hotly contested primaries occurring for both the Republican and Democratic races, accusations of voter suppression are further increasing tensions between supporters of both parties.