After the NY Times noticed unofficial primary vote counts indicated Barack Obama received no votes whatsoever in 80 (out of over 6000) districts, the NYC Board of Elections launched an investigation. Now Newsday reports the BoE says Obama "did not receive any votes in 27 of 82 election districts."
Unofficial counts, based on hand-written and hand-entered data from poll inspectors and police officers, are what the media - and campaigns - rely on to determine who won and to estimate the allocation of delegates. BoE spokeswoman, Valerie Vasquez-Rivera, said discrepancies in the other 55 districts, per Newsday, "did not affect the allocation of delegates to Obama" and said, "You're talking about less than 1 percent" of the districts.
BoE officials added many errors were made by police officers who misread the sheets when entering the results. They must have really misread them - the Brooklyn Paper reports, according to the unofficial results, former candidate Bill Richardson received hundreds of votes, including winning a district in Greenpoint with "200 votes to Clinton’s 46 and Obama’s 76."
Mayor Bloomberg, who had called the discrepancies an "outrage", repeated his desire for the partisan BoE to be reformed during his radio show. Bloomberg said it's "not beyond the realm of possibility" for voters to lose confidence in the election process. Maybe Bloomberg doesn't remember the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
And the AP has an enlightening/disheartening article about problems with poll workers in other areas. Here are some examples:
While folks in Washington were waiting hours to vote under record turnout Feb. 12, poll workers hid electronic voting machines because they didn't like the touch-screen devices. On Super Tuesday in Chicago, poll workers passed out pens meant for e-voting machines. When those instruments made no mark on paper ballots, election workers said they were full of invisible ink — an explanation that was upheld by onsite precinct judges.
Lloyd Leonard, who researched poll workers issues for the League of Women Voters, makes a good point to the AP, "We're running the most important part of our democracy on the backs of untrained, poorly paid volunteers. It's not their fault. Funding is not a priority. They aren't paid much. They try real hard. We should all volunteer and help them out." Here's information on becoming a stand-by NYC poll worker.
Some Gothamist readers noted misinformation from poll workers and even the Board of Elections on Super Tuesday primary day; LAist readers who were not registered Democrats were told they couldn't vote in California's open primary. Gotham Gazette has a good article about the voting process in NY State and the official results for the primary will be completed on Monday.
