It’s still dark out when Rob Kornblum walks down the stairs of the NYPIRG headquarters in lower Manhattan. He carries two paper bags full of bagels into the brightly-lit basement room and sets them down on a desk. Kornblum, the voter empowerment coordinator at NYPIRG, lays stacks of forms and memos by each of the ten landline telephones spaced out across folding tables lining the room. On a far wall, giant letters taped to a board spell out: NYPIRG VOTER HELPLINE.
For most of the electoral cycles in the past 24 years, NYPIRG has organized a centralized, non-partisan helpline and poll monitoring effort, serving the state of New York by offering voters assistance as they take to the polls to cast their ballots. Anything from faulty machinery to possible infringements of voter rights are taken down and reported by the NYPIRG team. “On a good year, you get broken machines, long lines, missing poll workers, too many affidavit ballots and just general problems at the polls,” said Neal Rosenstein, NYPIRG’s government reform coordinator. According to him, this year is going to be a doozy. “With more than two million voters expected, 1,200 poll sites and 36,000 poll workers interacting with voters, there’s a lot that can go wrong.”
By 6 a.m., the room is full of people rubbing sleep out of their eyes, helping themselves to an assortment of bagels and dark coffee from a two-foot tall metal pot. Suddenly, all ten phones blare out and for a moment the room is stunned. “Just testing them out!” Kornblum shouts out, cellphone in hand. By 6:15 a.m., the phones blare again. This time, it’s a voter asking for guidance on where to vote.. The 2016 NYPIRG Voter Helpline kicks into gear.
Over the next few hours, a rotating cast of phone attendants listen to complaints of broken scanners and hour-long lines. “Line cutters,” one attendant comments after putting her phone down. “The biggest threat to our democracy.” Some concerns are addressed easily enough, but others require some degree of investigation. One voter early in the day complained of receiving a ballot already filled in down the Republican line. A caller from Yonkers reported that a poll worker was telling people in Arabic to vote for Donald Trump. In Brooklyn, another poll worker was reported as telling people in line that they had to vote straight across a single party. “For all the complaints we’re receiving,” Rosenstein says, “This is sort of business as usual for us.”
While phone attendants field questions from callers, Kornblum pulls together ground teams and assigns them to head out to schools and poll sites across the city. “You see anything, you take a picture and send it back to me,” he said to one group gathered by the door. “A broken machine. A broken poll worker—“
“—a broken America?” suggested one of the idle phone attendants.
“Yeah, we’re trying to prevent that,” Kornblum said. These teams are primarily student volunteers from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Queensborough Community College, Pratt Institute and other partner schools. “We even have a couple high school students who came to us through the College Now Program at Queens College,” Kornblum said.
In a room adjacent to the Outreach Office, monitors flicker with updating Twitter feeds. This electoral cycle, the team is taking full advantage of the thousands of smartphone-enabled citizens on the field livetweeting their voting frustrations. Kornblum paces the helpline office between conversations, eyes trained on his smartphone. “We try to have eyes all over the city,” he said. “So if there’s a problem at a poll site, it can get solved as quickly as possible.”
Every few minutes the room buzzes with the deafening clatter of ten landlines going off simultaneously. The operators race each other to pick up the calls. According to Kornblum, fixing machines and reporting poll workers are short-term solutions. The only way to fix these problems in the long run is to push for electoral reforms that make voting easier and more efficient. Throughout the year, NYPIRG pushes for these very changes. But on election day, when one faulty scanner can make all the difference, the band-aid solutions are just as essential.
The NYPIRG Voter’s Helpline will be running up until 9:00 p.m. tonight. Voters in need of assistance can reach them at their hotline: (212) 822-0282.