MIDTOWN — The state attorney general's election hotline received 650 calls and emails from New Yorkers who encountered trouble while trying to vote for president Tuesday.
The figure — reported as of 6 p.m., a full three hours before the polls were set to close — is less than the 1,000 calls and emails the agency received for New York's chaotic presidential primary in April but still far more than for any other election cycle, said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
As the two-yearlong process of electing a new president wound down to its final day, weary New Yorkers faced long waits and broken scanning devices as they traveled to the polls.
The troubled Board of Elections even ran out of the popular "I Voted" stickers at polling sites across the city.
In Queens, voters said they received ballots that were pre-filled for Democratic candidates.
On the Upper East Side, voters in Yorkville waited for hours to vote as five of six vote scanners were malfunctioning.
In Harlem, lines were long at some polling sites due to broken scanners and poll workers who didn't show up to work.
The majority of the calls the AG's office received were about broken scanners, but there were also reports of extraordinarily long lines.
Additionally, there were also several reports of poll workers giving out misinformation. The AG's office received 10 reports of poll workers telling voters they needed to vote “down the party line.”
"A directive was sent by BOE at 4 p.m. today to inform poll workers that voters could choose to split their ticket if they so desired," Spitalnick said, as the attorney general's investigation continues.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who is also auditing the BOE, received more than 100 written complaints.
Disabled voters also faced difficulties exercising their right to vote in some Queens precincts, while voters in Harlem reported encountering problems seen citywide.
Kate Fillin-Yeh, 36, a city planner, said she arrived at P.S. 154 in Harlem round 8:30 a.m., where she encountered a frantic polling site, with lines snaking down the block because only one ballot scanner was working.
"There was an hour alone to be on line to sign your name and to get your ballot, then another hour and a half to get the scanner,” she said.
She went with her husband before heading to work, but she said she ended up standing around for more than two hours as workers scrambled.
Fillin-Yeh said it was crazy that New York doesn't have better voting choices such as early voting.
But voters were not deterred by the delays.
At P.S. 175 in Central Harlem, Tony Hillery, 57, the founder of Harlem Grown, a local nonprofit that brings urban agriculture and gardening programs to local residents, said the historic nature of the campaign wasn’t lost on him.
“Who woulda thunk?” he said outside the polling site. “Us black folk, we just got the right to vote in my lifetime and to vote for a black man twice and now a woman, who woulda thunk?”
