Tuesday, November 07, 2006

I'll bet they didn't run out of ballots in South Boston!! Just Mattapan and other minority neighborhoods.

Adam,

Where I vote, at Ward 11 Precinct 6 (Brookside Community Health Center, Washington St., JP) they had no ballots for more than an hour. They hadn't "run low" or even "very low." They were flat out of paper ballots, and dozens of people were milling about waiting to vote. At least a couple of people told us their friends or relatives had given up and gone home without voting. I was told the same thing happened down the street at English High School, and staffers for other campaigns (disclosure: I was Jill Stein's campaign manager) reported the same thing at other places in the city.

McNiff's statement indicates one of two things, and neither of them are good:

1) He (and, by extension, the secretary of state) are ignorant as to the scope of the debacle in Boston. People showed up at the peak voting hours (6-8p) and didn't have ballots. All of these neighborhoods - Roxbury, JP, Hyde Park, Dorchester - are what are known as "minority majority" - people of color are in the majority.

2) He's lying in an effort to sweep it under the rug.

We shouldn't let him get away with it.

My polling place (Reading) did not run out of ballots, but it WAS a total clusterf***. It was also staffed exclusively by old people who moved at a snail's pace. As someone who had just spent 45 minutes on the orange line coming home from work and just wanted to get home and lie down, voting was not a positive experience. But you gotta do it.

I know that at another JP precinct, the Warden saw around 2 pm that there were only about 100 ballots left, so they called and got more. I wonder at what point the wardens in the other precincts noticed they had a problem ....

Note: CNN did a report on the same thing in Indiana, I believe, yesterday. Too much turnout, and look at the results!