If you voted by affidavit in NYC, your vote probably wasn’t counted.
Of the approximately 121,000 votes cast by affidavit in a scandal and snafu plagued April 19 primary, nearly three quarters – more than 90,000 – were declared invalid, according to an attorney who is suing the Board of Elections on behalf of Election Justice USA, a group that is devoted to alleviating voter suppression.
“If you did vote by affidavit, you can go to the Board of Elections and find out if your ballot was rejected. If it was, you can go to Election Justice (electionjusticeusa.org) and we’ll take it to court,” in hopes of getting it counted, said Jonathan C. Clarke, a Long Island attorney who is also running for the third congressional seat on a reform platform.
The primary results were certified because none of the campaigns for the various candidates wished to get bogged down challenging them, said Clarke.
“I’m very disappointed,” that no one was willing to contest the results, Clarke continued. “A lot of the people purged from the voter lists (about 126,000 voters in NYC) were from African American and Hispanic areas,” and the Board also violated the law in dropping some voters from the lists less than 30 days before the election, Clarke said.
The City Board of Elections and State Board of Elections did not respond to requests for comment.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio recently offered the NYC BOE $20 million in exchange for implementing needed reforms — an offer that, according to City Council member Ben Kallos, the BOE has rejected. Kallos said in a statement last week that the Council had passed legislation for a voter information portal and called on Albany to permit same day and online registration.
