Angry New York City voters yesterday waited hours on frigid lines only to find disorganized polling places on a chaotic Election Day plagued by broken ballot scanners.
Technical problems and disorganized and understaffed polling places led to anarchic conditions — and Mayor Bloomberg blasted the city Board of Elections.
“All the crowds — it’s hard to get around, nobody knows where anything is. It is about as inefficient a system,” said Bloomberg. “I kept hearing, ‘What’s this, a third-world country?’ ”
Park Slope voters went to their usual polling place to find it had been turned into a shelter for Sandy victims.
So they schlepped 10 blocks to PS 282, where five out of six ballot scanners were down as of 1 p.m. and “they ran out of pencils,” said Neal Rosenstein of NYPIRG.
Upper East Side voters rose at the crack of dawn to face 2-hour-long lines at MS 167 on East 76th Street. And at PS 75 on West 96th Street, workers struggled to keep up with a flood of displaced voters from storm-ravaged neighborhoods.
“I have never seen it like this before. Usually, there is an ebb and flow; today it is just constant,” said one election official. “People are coming from the Rockaways and Long Island because they can’t get to the usual polling places. We just can’t do it — we are not fast enough with the volume.”
A last-minute executive order by Gov. Cuomo allowing Sandy refugees to vote outside their normal districts only added to the confusion.
In Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, D.C. Vito, 37, waited 2 1/2 hours before giving up without casting a ballot.
“I have never not voted in an election,” he said, “I’m sad. There is no order. Police are yelling at people, and that’s not helping the situation. There was pushing. It started getting a little scary.”
Yolanda Pairson, 65, passed out while waiting in the block-long line.
“She was so cold her blood sugar dropped,” said her daughter Karen Leftuy, 39.“She was waiting an hour. Nobody told us she could skip the line.”
Even Hizzoner had troubles casting his ballot at PS 6 on East 81st Street, when a worker could not locate his name in the roster.
“Voter turnout is high. That’s a good thing. But it does result in long lines,” said Elections spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez.
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick, Dana Sauchelli, Beth DeFalco