More than 3,500 voter-registration forms delivered by the state to the city’s Board of Elections in September weren’t discovered until after the election in November.
“They were sitting in a hallway,” said one source. “No one noticed.”
As a result, the names of the new voters were missing from the official log books, and those who went to vote on Nov. 4 couldn’t use the regular election machines and were told they’d have to fill out paper ballots.
The embarrassing oversight was discovered two days later, on Nov. 6.
Election officials rushed to enter the missing names into the records before any results were certified.
“Everyone who filled out the form correctly, their votes would, in fact, be valid,” said Valerie Vasquez, spokeswoman for the city’s Board of Elections. “All those votes will be counted.”
The board was swamped by 200,000 new registrations in the week before the Oct. 10 deadline.
Officials said the state Board of Elections forwarded 3,552 to the city on Sept. 10. For reasons no one can explain right now, they sat unopened for nearly two months.
(Source: NY Post)