Two married voters in the northern part of Columbia County—let’s call them Jack and Diane—report the following struggle they have had trying to vote locally in this election cycle:
The couple have two homes: One in Columbia County, and an apartment in New York City. Some years ago, they say, they chose to vote via their Columbia County residence and not in NYC, as is the well-established right of dual homeowners.
This spring, they changed City apartments, and filed the necessary paperwork with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) there for their licenses. (Note: The address on one’s driver’s license does not determine where a dual resident can vote.)
In October, the couple caught wind that there was a problem with their registration, and went to the Columbia County Board of Elections to make sure they would be able to vote.
After getting barked at for bringing their tiny lapdog into the office, “my wife and I both filled out the voter registration forms” at 401 State, Jack says, “and turned them in at the same time.
Jack continues:
“A few weeks later my wife got a call from [Board of Elections staffer] Jimmy Dolan saying that she was flagged by the state and that she was registered to vote in Queens and couldn't vote Upstate. She then told him that our registration had been switched by mistake and that we re-registered with him a few weeks prior. He said he would look into it.
“After not hearing anything more about it we went to vote at the courthouse on November 2nd and they told my wife that she wasn't able to vote because she was registered in Queens and had been “purged from the system...
“They then said that they got notification from the state on October 13th that [Diane] was registered in Queens and that there must have been a lag from her address change in June until the state notified them of the address change.“I had also changed my address but they said they received my address change notification in june. This notification from the State apparently had overridden her new registration application and she was now unable to vote.
“After contacting the Commisioner they allowed her to fill out an affidavit and a ballot that they informed us may not be submitted.”
“This whole process was so frustrating and complicated that my wife was almost ready to leave without filing the affidavit,” Jack writes. “I would imagine that many others just left instead of trying to understand what happened and filing the affidavit.”
Diane notes that this is not the first issue she has encountered with the County elections board:
“I’m a little frustrated with that office... [W]hen we got married two years ago, they had me with my maiden name, so the first time I voted there was a problem, too. Hudson couldn’t figure it out... Who’s to say this isn’t going to happen again?”
In the end, Jack was registered and allowed to vote locally, while Diane voted by an affidavit ballot—which ought to be counted, but could potentially could be thrown out or challenged.
The story might stop there... until Jack reports a kicker to this story, which raises a far broader concern:
“In the process of trying to show us how common these types of problems are Jimmy Dolan showed me a stack of other voters who [he said] had also been ‘purged’ from the Columbia Country voter registration because of similar problems which made me even more uncomfortable. It seemed that there is some common issue with people that own homes in the County and attempted to change their registration to vote upstate but had been ‘purged’ and unable to vote upstate.
“We live in a time where this process of registering and voting should be very simple but it isn't. I don't understand why.”
Asked by this site for comment, Columbia County Democratic Elections Commissioner Virginia Martin replied:
“The ‘purge’ [referenced] is likely a NYSVoter notice of duplicate voter. It means that the state database has identified one voter registered in two counties. Notification is provided to the counties (or maybe only to the older county), and the process is that the county with the earlier registration date almost always confirms that it’s a duplicate and thus cancels the voter from that county… The goal, of course, is to make sure that no one’s registered in two places.”
As in our earlier report on registration issues, Martin shifted much of the blame on other offices:
“There have been a lot of these just recently. I think it’s because sometimes the database favors us with a slew of them, all at once, as if the floodgates opened. I don’t think any of us know why. It’s terrible timing, for sure.
“Maybe it has to do with the way the NYCBOE works—it’s historically not been too prompt or too cooperative with the NYSVoter system, and that tardiness has in the past been a problem for other counties that have to interact with them. I’m guessing NYCBOE suddenly uploaded a number of registrations, they hit NYSVoter, and NYSVoter notified us. But that’s a wild guess on my part.”
Another potential source of the problem: Issues arising from the form people use with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Per Martin:
“Then there is the confusion with DMV. Voters changing their address with DMV can opt to have that address info sent to the BOE at their new address, or not. Not infrequently they overlook that box, not checking it when they should, or maybe checking it when they shouldn’t have. The result sometimes is an unwanted change of address which prompts the former county to cancel the voter. Sometimes they change their address with DMV and understand that the change will effect a voter registration in the new county, but that’s not always the case. We get a lot of complaints. I think it’s generally the result of a design flaw in the paper or online documents. The state BOE is aware of it and has been working on it.”
That does appear to explain, at least partially, how a problem might have arisen for Diane—though she and Jack did all their paperwork together, are confident they filled out the forms the same way. So the couple remains perplexed that one of their registrations was deemed valid, while the other got purged.
In Jack and Diane’s case, it appears the voters went an extra mile to get the problem fixed—whoever’s fault it may have been. Yet the benefit of the doubt was counted against Diane, not against the bureaucrats charged with helping voters.
“They were quick to characterize how this could have happened in a way that put the blame on us,” Jack noted in an interview on Sunday. “They kept saying that we must have visited the DMV after October 5th” though the couple had never visited the DMV at all, merely filing a license update by mail in late Spring.
“They kept saying that you must have done something wrong,” Diane recalls.
This site will attempt to follow up in a few weeks to find out if Diane’s affidavit ballot gets counted in the end.
