Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
For the past week or so, I’ve been warning readers that the supposedly “liberal” state of New York has some of the most repressive voting laws in the country. Before reading the rest of this post, I suggest refreshing your memory on just how undemocratic New York is by checking out the following:
Published April 13th: Hillary Clinton Will Win New York, Because New York is Running a Banana Republic Primary
Published yesterday: As Expected, New York’s Primary is Already a Pathetic Mess
As such, two things were obvious going into the New York primary: 1) Hillary Clinton would win. 2) There would be an enormous amount of voter suppression and fraud.
Well the results are in, and the state of the state in New York is very, very bad.
The Daily Beast reports:
Alba Guerrero was dumbfounded. She’d arrived at her polling place in Ozone Park, Queens only to be told that she had been registered as a Republican since 2004.
That was news to her. She remembers registering to vote for the first time as a Democrat so she could vote for Barack Obama in the general election in 2008. When she recently moved from Manhattan to Ozone Park, in Queens, she re-registered at the DMV, she says, and even checked online on March 9th to be sure she was registered at her new address.
But when she showed up to vote for Bernie Sanders at PS63 on Tuesday, she says she was told she couldn’t. New York is a closed primary, where only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic Primary—and voters had to be registered by last October. She was told—very politely, she wants to make clear—by poll workers to take it up with a judge. She was given a court order in nearby Forest Hills.
Guerrero drove to the Queens County Board of Elections and pled her case, but Judge Ira Margulis initially turned her away.
“The judge tells me, ‘No, that’s it—2004.’ He shows me, I’m registered as a Republican. He says there’s nothing we can do,” she said.
But on her way out she saw a Board of Elections worker holding something with her name on it. It was her 2004 voter registration, replete, she remembers, with her name, her social security number, her birthday—and someone else’s signature.
“I said, ‘Excuse me, that’s not my signature,’” she said. “It’s not my handwriting. It showed completely different signatures.”
Sure enough, the signatures are strikingly different. Next to a box checked “Republican,” her 2004 signature is written in clear, deliberate, legible cursive and includes her middle name. Her more recent signature is a loopy, illegible scrawl. She insists she’s never changed it in her life, and says she can produce old tax forms to prove it.
So Guerrero went back to to Judge Margulis and showed him the discrepancy.
“He allowed me to change for that day,“ she said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who tweeted at 11:50 a.m., “There’s nothing more punk rock than voting. #GetOutAndVote”, had to change his tune by the end of the day. WNYC reported this morning that 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats had been removed from the voting rolls since last fall.
What a fake liberal clown.
“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,” he said in a statement released after 5 p.m. on Election Day. “I am calling on the Board of Election to reverse that purge and update the lists again using Central, not Brooklyn borough, Board of Election staff.”
A spokesperson for New York Attorney Eric Schneiderman told the New York Daily News that his office received “by far the largest volume of complaints we have received for an election since Attorney General Schneiderman took office in 2011.”
Some polling sites did not open on time, citing too few election workers. Others had faulty voting machines, or were delivered half the number of promised voting machines.
“I spent three hours this morning trying to vote,” he said. “I’m at a loss for words. I don’t understand that in the 21st century you have to stand in front of a judge to get to vote. It was laughable.”
Gershman was peeved by what happened to him, but he wonders what would’ve happened if he didn’t have a car, or the ability to miss a morning of work to fight for his ballot. And he’s also confounded by what happened to Guerrero’s voter registration form, which he shared on YouTube and calls “pretty clear fraud.”
Guerrero calls the whole incident “creepy.” She has “no idea” who might want to forge her signature on a voter registration form.
“It’s just disheartening. We’re supposed to be the number one country in the world, but things like this you’d imagine would happen in a second or third-world country,” she said. “What happened to me, basically, was fraud.”
Welcome to the real America, Alba Guerrero.