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In North and Northeast Philly, hundreds left wondering if their votes will count
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In North and Northeast Philly, hundreds left wondering if their votes will count
Heather Kelly, 34, has been election judge at the 66th Ward, 46th Division since she was 18 years old, and she's never seen an election like this one. Longtime voters, people she'd seen year after year, had suddenly vanished from the poll books — listed at their former addresses. She said calls to the City Commissioners office and Committee of Seventy didn't provide much help. "One in particular is a police officer that's been up here for 10 years. I know him, I see him every day and he had his driver's license here. But he's not in my book." He was told to go vote at his address from 10 years back. Same with an elderly woman, whose sister appeared in the book while she did not. Her old polling place was on South Seventh Street. "I don't like sending people down there. And they're older women," Kelly said. All told she said more than 20 people had left without voting; a few submitted provisional ballots but were warned they likely wouldn't count.
Meanwhile, around Temple University the problem was exponentially worse. Some polling places had more than 100 provisional ballots filed; at one polling place, at least one in five ballots was filed provisionally because the voters were not listed in the voting rolls. The polling place ran out of provisional ballots and people had to wait while more were retrieved.
Vanessa Wright of PennPIRG says she abruptly shifted her get-out-the-vote operation on Temple's campus to focus on monitoring the situation with provisional ballots. "There's clearly a problem here," she said. "our main concern is making sure that people's voices are heard, and encouraging young people to vote. At one point there were 15 people [waiting at the polling place at 10th and Oxford] waiting for provisional ballots because they ran out. We want to make sure people have a good first voting experience." She said it didn't help that the City Commissioners' phone line seemed to be busy most of the day. Penn PIRG is collecting names of voters required to vote provisionally. Groups had been contemplating legal action, but Stephanie Wein of Penn PIRG said the judge at the Central Election Court had declined to hear a complaint this evening.
Valerie Haley was helping her mom, elections judge Ida Haley, at a 20th ward polling place where about 50 ballots had been cast provisionally. They had also seen longtime voters disappear form therim book mysteriously. "The ones that had been int eh book and now were not were pretty upset about it," Haley said. She said it was the first time she'd experienced this, and that state Sen. Shirley Kitchen had helped out with legal counsel to explain how to proceed.
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