New York officials launch investigation after 120,000 registered Democrats disappear in Brooklyn

Voters were also turned away at the polls on Tuesday.

Stickers rest on a table in Manhattan. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

With five candidates left in the race to the White House, millions of New Yorkers hit the polls on Tuesday for the latest, most important primary in the 2016 election. Unfortunately, hundreds of voters were turned away from casting their ballots and thousands more simply vanished from record completely—prompting an investigation into the city’s Board of Elections, a federal lawsuit to restore voting rights and allegations of voter suppression.

Three candidates with deep ties to the Empire State — Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — began holding campaign events across the city nearly two weeks ago. Tagging along in their shadows were Ted Cruz and John Kasich, who never had a chance in the state and spent of most of their time eating every New York delicacy they could get their hands on.

Polls projected Clinton and Trump to win by wide margins, but the Brooklyn-born Sanders was expected to give New York’s former senator a run for her money. No one expected either Republican to come close to touching Trump’s double-digit lead.


 A man votes in Brooklyn. Stephanie Keith/Getty
 (Stephanie Keith/Getty)

However, New Yorkers were not able to easily select their candidates on Tuesday, with more than 120,000 Democratic voters vanishing without trace or explanation in King’s County, which was first discovered by WNYC. Comptroller Scott Stringer later promised to audit the city’s Board of Elections.

“There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site,” Stringer said in a statement.

“The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also demanded answers for the drop in registered Democrats, that saw a dramatic decrease in names between November 2015 and April 2016.

“This number surprises me,” Mayor 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.”

Voters who were turned away at their local polling stations phoned into New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office, which said they received 562 phone calls and 140 email complaints from primary voters. New Yorkers were told they were not registered to vote, they were not registered with a political party or they were straight up denied affidavit ballots.

“To put this in context, we received roughly 150 total complaints for the 2012 general election,” the Attorney Schneiderman’s office wrote in a statement, adding that the largest share of complaints came from Kings County. “This is by far the largest volume of complaints we have received for an election since [he] took office in 2011.”

On the eve of the election, national voting rights organization Election Justice USA filed a emergency lawsuit in an attempt to restore those prevented from voting.

“Voters are frustrated, angry, and feel helpless,” said EJUSA spokesperson Shyla Nelson. “We have heard hundreds of stories, with desperate pleas for help. This election season has excited and galvanized the voting public in unprecedented numbers. For these voters to be systematically and erroneously removed from the rolls or prevented from voting in their party of choice is devastating to them personally and has sent a wave of doubt and worry through the voting public.”