BREAKING: Hillary Clinton will win the New York Democratic primary, according to a CNN projection.
NEW YORK CITY — Bernie Sanders’ campaign on Tuesday called reports of voting irregularities in New York state “a disgrace” as New York City officials contended with the potential for mass confusion in Brooklyn, where the Board of Elections has confirmed that more than 125,000 Democratic voters had been stripped from the rolls.
“From long lines and dramatic understaffing to longtime voters being forced to cast affidavit ballots and thousands of registered New Yorkers being dropped from the rolls, what’s happening today is a disgrace,” Sanders spokesman Karthik Ganapathy said in an email to CNN, calling the difficulties a “shameful demonstration.”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Hillary Clinton supporter, called for major reforms to the Board of Elections as a series of snafus continued to bubble up, including reports of the errant “purge” in Brooklyn.
“It has been reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors that the voting lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists,” de Blasio said in a statement Tuesday calling on the board to “reverse that purge.”
“The perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed,” he said.
Speaking to CNN on Tuesday night, Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan pushed back against the growing criticism, saying, “We’re not finding that there were issues throughout the city that are any different than what we experience in other elections.”
“Since eyes and ears of world are on New York, issues that are relatively routine for any election are receiving greater scrutiny,” he added.
Of the 126,000 Democratic voters taken off from the rolls in Brooklyn, Ryan said 12,000 had moved out of borough, while 44,000 more had been placed in an inactive file after mailings to their homes bounced back. An additional 70,000 were already inactive and, having failed to vote in two successive federal elections or respond to cancel notices, were removed.
In pledging to audit the board, the office of New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer issued a much stricter verdict.
“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,” he said.
The Clinton campaign had no immediate comment when asked by CNN.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s voter complaint hotline had “received more than 700 complaints from voters across (New York state)” before 4 p.m., Schneiderman spokesman Nick Benson tweeted. The same office, he added, had heard only around 150 on the day of the 2012 general election.
New York’s polls closed at 9 p.m.
