Problems Reported With New Voting Machines

Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times Confusion during early-morning voting at Public School 75 on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side.

A new voting system unveiled in New York City for the primary election on Tuesday was plagued by problems, with some polling places opening hours late and others verging on chaos as workers coped with malfunctioning machines.

Some polling sites did not receive the optical scanners needed to read paper ballots by 6 a.m., when voting was supposed to begin. At other polling places, the scanners failed to operate properly when they were switched on, forcing voters to wait while election workers struggled to get the devices going.

In still others, workers seemed flummoxed by procedures that accompanied the new equipment, especially for accepting ballots when the scanners did not function. At times the frustration boiled over, and there were shouting matches between voters and poll workers.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the glitches “a royal screw-up” and said: “It’s completely unacceptable. New Yorkers deserve better than this.”

The mayor denounced the city’s Board of Elections, which was responsible for overseeing the change from mechanical voting machines to computerized ones.

The elections board said that 71 polling places opened late and that it had spent months training its workers for the introduction of the $50 million system bought early this year.

But the agency, frequently criticized as having a patronage-heavy work force, drew widespread voter anger for its lack of preparedness.

Herb Gingold of Kew Gardens, Queens, could not vote when he got to his polling site about 9 a.m. because the machines had yet to arrive. “It’s very disturbing that in this country, with all the talk about the election 10 years ago being mismanaged so badly, that this continues to happen,” Mr. Gingold, a psychologist, said.

“We’ve had plenty of time to get these machines out and get them ready, and it’s a scandal that they’re not ready.”

The public advocate, Bill de Blasio, discovered that, for lack of keys to start the new machines, his polling place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, did not start collecting ballots until around 9 a.m.

“Whatever the exact protocol is, it didn’t happen,” Mr. de Blasio said. “So basically, the folks in Park Slope were disenfranchised.”

Even Senator Charles E. Schumer was held up when he arrived at Public School 321, also in Park Slope, just before 6 a.m. He and other voters had to wait 15 to 20 minutes before the machines were ready to take their ballots.

There were also reports of problems at some polling places in Harlem, where Representative Charles B. Rangel faced a tough primary fight.

Alberta Slappy, the president of the tenants association at the George Washington Carver Houses, said residents had been turned away at the polling place at Public School 72 on East 104th Street.

“There were no machines,” Ms. Slappy said, adding that the poll workers eventually let people vote on paper ballots.

Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the Board of Elections, said every new machine used in one of the city’s 1,358 polling places had been tested in advance to make sure it met state standards.

The board had increased training for poll workers by 50 percent, Ms. Vazquez said, to prepare for the debut of the new machines.

“Every year, Election Days bring challenges,” she wrote in an e-mail. “This year, the Board of Elections in the City of New York knew the change to the new voting system would present additional challenges.”

Ms. Vazquez promised the board would do better in the Nov. 2 general election. “We will apply all lessons learned,” she said.

The board has long been seen as a vestige of the city’s political machines; it is run by five Democratic and five Republican commissioners who are appointed by the City Council and are not accountable to the mayor or any other city or state agency.

The political infighting has been so intense that the board could not agree on an executive director for much of this year. Finally, last month, the job went to George Gonzalez, who had been the deputy executive director, after the Democrats on the board persuaded a Republican commissioner from the Bronx to side with them.

The board employed 751 people, of whom roughly one-third were temporary election workers, in the fiscal year that ended in June 2009, the most recent for which figures were available. They were paid $25.7 million, according to the city’s Office of Payroll Administration.

In January, the board awarded a contract to Elections Systems and Software, an Omaha company, to provide the machines in time for the primary on Tuesday.

The contract was highly prized: bidders spent millions of dollars to hire lobbyists.

The day after the contract was announced, one of the lobbyists for Election Systems and Software, Anthony Mangone, a lawyer in Westchester County, was indicted by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, on extortion and other charges related to real estate projects in Yonkers.

Months later, several members of the Board of Elections received subpoenas from Mr. Bharara’s office.

The subpoenas, according to people who have been briefed on them, were broad and related to the structure and contract procedures of the board. The status of the investigation is unclear, and a spokeswoman for the United States attorney declined to comment about it.

John S. Groh, a senior vice president for Elections Systems and Software who was in New York City on Tuesday visiting poll sites, said he could understand why some voters were irritated.

“Our staff has witnessed hundreds of poll sites that ran smoothly,” he said. “But when a jurisdiction switches to a new voting technique, we know and we expect voting issues to occur. They’ve used the same system for 60 years, and change is difficult.”

Some election workers said there was a learning curve as they tried to master the machines.

“Everything is new to everybody,” said Alice Wong, a poll worker at Public School 20 in Flushing, Queens.

Ms. Wong said two scanners had failed around 7 a.m. “Sometimes it scans, sometimes it doesn’t,” she said.

Promising to pursue the matter, Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, said: “My office will work to hold the Board of Elections accountable for the problems voters experienced today. It is imperative we have an independent review and immediate action to fix the problem, so we don’t relive these mistakes in the November general election.”

At City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg noted that the Board of Elections had received many millions of dollars to help prepare for the new voting system.

“Over the past five years,” he said, “the city has provided the Board of Elections with more than $77 million to make the transition to the new machines — and that doesn’t include the $85 million in federal funds.”

“But there is a total absence of accountability for how the board performed on Election Day,” the mayor added, “because the board is a remnant of the days when Tammany Hall ran New York.”

Reporting was contributed by Ann Farmer, Elissa Gootman, Javier C. Hernandez, Raymond Hernandez, Colin Moynihan, Nate Schweber and Rebecca White.

Earlier versions of this post were updated.