What went wrong at the polling places in New York City? It was something in the air. Literally.
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What went wrong at the polling places in New York City? It was something in the air. Literally.
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What went wrong at the polling places in New York City? It was something in the air. Literally.
The autopsy of what went wrong at the polling places in New York City on Election Day will not take place for days, but weeks. Throughout the city, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and the Bronx, ballot scanners jammed and malfunctioned, sowing chaos at polling places.
But preliminarily, it seems to be one of those rare occasions when election officials can plausibly blame the climate, at least in part.
The five counties saw unusually high precipitation on Tuesday with almost 100 percent humidity, while New Yorkers walked in the rain to cast their vote.
Those are not exactly the perfect conditions for the DS200, the widely used ballot scanner manufactured by ES & S based in Nebraska. According to its technical documents, the scanner becomes completely uncomfortable when the weather becomes sweaty.
Climate control may have made a difference, but as school gyms and other polling places became stifling and oppressive, poll workers at some polling places opened windows. At PS 11 in Brooklyn, the small respite from the open windows was even greeted with cheers from overheated voters.
Meanwhile, voters in soaked outfits or forced to queue in the rain had difficulty keeping dry tickets. "Wet ballots, caused by people waiting in the rain, are causing the scanners to malfunction at my polling place" in Manhattan, New York. Chairman of the Board Corey Johnson tweeted.
"The DS200 is not protected against the harmful entry of moisture" read a 2012 manual ES & S sent to Idaho election officials. The manual warns that you should not "operate the scanner in an excessively humid environment".
Why does moisture matter when scanning tickets?
Normal paper ballots will pass smoothly through a ticket scanner.
But high humidity can cause paper ballots to expand ...
... and jam ticket scanners.
Ally J. Levine / ProPublica
Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, told WNYC that wet conditions were only half the story.
"Based on my personal and anecdotal experience, there were more scanners stuck than I would normally have seen," Kellner said. "I attribute it to the two-page ballot and the humid weather."
This year, for the first time, New York used a ballot that had to be spread along a perforation before both sections entered the ballot scanner. Mayor Bill de Blasio described the situation as "absolutely unacceptable" in An interview with the radio station 1010 WINS..
"ES & S is working closely with election officials in New York City to ensure that ballots are processed accurately and safely," the company said in a statement on Tuesday. "Due to an unusually long ballot, some precincts have experienced traffic jams due to ballots that are not properly separated or have excess moisture."
At PS 207, in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, the four ballot scanners stopped working for almost two hours. A representative from the New York City Board of Elections covered the traffic jams of moisture and rain, and voters pressed the wet ballots too hard on the scanners.
After an ES & S technician arrived to fix the machines, one of the repaired scanners broke again, this time irreparably. She told a voting officer that the traffic jams continued to happen in the same way and that they would continue to be a problem during the voting.
Further away, in the center of the city, in the Mount Hope neighborhood of the Bronx, Judith-Anne Bryan, a survey worker, said she had never seen so many scanners at the same time. Stephen F. Williams, the site coordinator at another polling place in the Bronx, said: "I can not call a technician here when there are 50 and 60 other polls blocked."
The consequences can go beyond the long lines and irritate New Yorkers. Scanners, when functioning properly, detect cases in which voters accidentally vote for two candidates for a given position, which gives them the opportunity to correct their ballot, according to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Democracy. Technology. "What we can see is a much larger number of invalid tickets at the best ticket races than we normally see because many voters did not get the benefit of the scanner verifying their work," Hall said.
As the day progressed, concerns grew that the emergency ballot boxes could overflow. "I could ask the director for a big trash can and put it there," said George Maczkiewicz, coordinator of another polling place in the Bronx.
Ray Shappell of Brooklyn said his wife, who had a morning meeting at work, almost left without voting at PS 22, where three fallen scanners left a two-hour line that stretched halfway down the block.
"I would compare it to horrible experiences at the DMV," Shappell said. "Your ability to vote should not be compared to trying to renew your license."
Jazmin Goodwin, Orla McCaffrey, Gabriel Sandoval and Lukas Southard contributed to this story.
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