Brooklyn – Councilman David Greenfield is lashing out at the Board of Elections for creating ballots with small print that are unreadable to many voters. In order to cram in a lot of information on a very small ballot, the Board of Elections decided to shrink the font size of the ballot.

“The Board of Elections should have known that this would be a problem,” said Councilman Greenfield. “I have spoken with many exasperated seniors who are upset because they were unable to vote properly due to the tiny font used on today’s General Election ballot. Quite frankly, as a thirty-something year-old City Councilman, even I had trouble reading the consistently tiny print on the ballot.”

At his polling site in Bensonhurst this morning, Councilman Greenfield received numerous complaints from poll workers who told him that many seniors simply left the polling site without voting on Election Day. “One poll worker told me that a senior was so frustrated with the ballot that she tore it in two and left in tears. That kind of disenfranchisement of our seniors is simply unacceptable,” said Councilman Greenfield.

The ballots in New York City have been designed by the New York City Board of Elections so that all candidates appear on one side of the two-sided form. At every polling station, voting booths are supposed to be equipped with magnifying sheets. However, many seniors have complained that these sheets were either not there or did not work very well. Apparently, the sheets are only designed to magnify the font at one-and-a-half times the original size.

Councilman Greenfield has been leading the criticism of the Board of Elections since he experienced first-hand the difficulty of voting on brand new paper ballots in the Primary Election in September. Greenfield fired off letters to United States Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez and New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo calling for close monitoring of voting throughout New York City during the November 2nd general election, as well as additional training for poll workers.

As a result of Councilman Greenfield’s well-publicized efforts to remedy privacy breaches following the primary election, as well as the continued failure of the New York City Board of Elections over the last several weeks, the Board’s Executive Director, George Gonzalez, was fired effective October 25th.

Councilman Greenfield concluded, “Once again, the Board of Elections has proven to be inefficient at running elections. The problem really lies in the political nature of how the board’s commissioners and staff are selected. Starting tomorrow, the State legislature should introduce comprehensive legislation that makes the Board of Election accountable to the people.”

(YWN Desk – NYC)