And It Will Ever Be Thus

Every national election, politicians express outrage only to have the same cycle repeated. New Yorkers are saying that they are facing the same barriers to voting from long lines to broken machines.

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The problem is that after such incompetence, no one is usually held accountable. In the meantime, officials use their own poor performance to secure more money for the next election, which seems to follow the very same cycle.

  Jonathan Turley

 The voter-registration deadline for the April 19 [New York] primary closed 25 days beforehand, when no candidate had even campaigned in New York, and independent or unaffiliated voters had to change their party registrations by October 9, 193 days before April 19, to vote in the closed Democratic or Republican primaries. This will disenfranchise nearly 30 percent of New Yorkers, including, most famously, the Trump children, who didn’t change their registrations from independent to Republican in time.

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Three million registered New Yorkers won’t be able to vote in the state’s primary because they are not affiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties.

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 “Thirty-seven percent of voters under the age of 30—the Vermont senator’s core group of supporters—aren’t registered to a political party in New York City,” writes Russell Berman in The Atlantic. There’s a good chance a surge of non-affiliated voters will show up at the polls on Tuesday, only to be turned away.

  The Nation

That's bad, but maybe they should learn their state's voter requirements, no?  Of course, if independents haven't heard any candidates speak by the deadline for registering as a party member, it makes it less likely that they'll know they want to vote when the primary comes around.

 Governor Andrew Cuomo called for early voting and automatic registration in his 2016 State of the State address, but neither chamber of the legislature advanced the proposals. “The key to reforming our government is engaging people in the democratic process,” Cuomo said. “So why do we make it so difficult for the people to participate?”

I think we know the answer to that.

 Hundreds of New Yorkers have also filed suit because their registrations have mysteriously changed from Democratic or Republican to not affiliated or independent.

Now that's bad.  Mostly, it seems it's Democrat voters that have been screwed in this way.

WNYC analysis of state voter enrollment statistics found that the number of active registered Democrats dropped there by 63,558 voters between November 2015 and April 2016. That translates into a 7 percent drop in registered Democrats in the borough.

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Despite the precipitous decline, no city or state election official could explain to WNYC why the number had dropped in a borough that’s been a hotbed of campaign activity, and has the highest population in the state, raising the perennial concern that there will be chaos at the polls on Tuesday caused in part by the very agency responsible for overseeing voter registration and election administration: the Board of Elections.

  WYNC

Apparently, this is not happening only in New York, but an emergency lawsuit has been filed, and is scheduled for hearing at 2:00pm today.  A little short on time considering today is the primary!

Election Justice USA encouraged voters who had their registration changed to cast provisional ballots on Tuesday. If the lawsuit is successful, those provisional ballots will be counted as valid votes.

  LawNewz

WNYC reported Tuesday that over 123,000 Democratic voters in Kings County—a.k.a Brooklyn—had mysteriously disappeared from the Board of Elections' records since November of 2015. (The deadline for New Yorkers to change party affiliation was October 9, the earliest in the country, and the deadline for first-time voters to register was March 25.)

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio took the Board of Elections to task and demanded an investigation into the sudden drop on Monday, reported WNYC.

"This number surprises me," de Blasio said. "I admit that Brooklyn has had a lot of transient population—that’s obvious. Lot of people moving in, lot of people moving out. That might account for some of it. But I'm confused since so many people have moved in, that the number would move that much in the negative direction."

No other county in the state saw losses in Democratic voter registrations that were so extreme, WNYC's Brigid Bergin pointed out—in fact, the vast majority of New York's counties saw significant increases in Democratic registrations.

"In this very blue state, we have this crazy drop in the bluest county in New York," Bergin said.

Brooklyn showed Hillary Clinton the least support out of New York's five boroughs in the 2008 primary, as Mediaite reported.

  Common Dreams

One lady reported when she found out her party affiliation had been changed, she went into her local election board, and they pulled up a record that showed she'd changed it in 2012. The only problem was, it wasn't her signature on the form.

Over half of the public say that they cannot support Trump, Cruz, or Clinton in the general election. Indeed, the two frontrunners, Trump and Clinton, have the highest negatives in their respective parties. The system has produced frontrunners that 6 out of 10 voters say they cannot support.

  Jonathan Turley

Great system, eh?