Concerns for Election Day
October 28th, 2008
With the election a week away and record turnouts anticipated, concerns are mounting about whether polling places, ballot boxes and voting machines will be able to cope.
In an editorial today, the Times ticks off its many worries about the system in New York city, beginning with the New York City Board of Elections: “a nest of good old-fashioned patronage that Boss Tweed and the boys down at Tammany Hall would have admired.” So far this year, the board, according to the Times, mailed out absentee ballots too late, purged 30,000 voters and could not cope with a flood of last-minute registrants.
Further complicating matters here is New York’s slow crawl toward installing new voting technology to comply with the http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm Help America Vote Act. Nov. 4 supposedly will be the swan song for our lever machines, and as a kind of transition, each polling place this year also will have to provide a ballot marking device, intended to make voting easier for disabled New Yorkers but available to any of us who would like to use it. Jarrett Murphy reports in City Limits that few voters took advantage of the new technology on September’s primary day, but that could change next Tuesday. And some indications from the light-turnout primary do not bode well. A Center for Independence of the Disabled NY report found machines that were not plugged in and some that were inaccessible. A number of pollworkers did not know how to use the devices, and other machines broke down.
But things could be worse. In the New Yorker recently, Jill Lepore describes how voting took place in the early days of the republic. People had to provide their own paper and write the names of who they wished to vote for and for what office — and yes, spelling did count. Voting required bravery as well. According to Lapore, ” In the middle decades of the 19th century, 89 Americans were killed at the polls during Election Day riots.” And complaining was rarely effective: “To vacate an election,” Lapore quotes an election-law textbooks of the day, “it must clearly appear that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness.”
For more on voting some 150 years later, including where to vote, how to vote and who’s on the ballot, see Gotham Gazette’s Guide for the Last Minute Voter.
By Gail Robinson on October 28, 2008, 3:37 pmIn category: Electoral Politics, Gotham City, Governing | No Comments »

