You Won’t Believe Who Was Disenfranchised In NY Primary Snafu


Oh, dear. The election results have barely been counted and the problems in New York just keep getting bigger.

By now we have all read about the voting problems in Arizona and New York.  People had their party affiliations changed, their names dropped, and their voting records lost. It’s pretty much been a mess.

But the assumption has been that most of the disenfranchised voters were the less affluent folks.

Well, it turns out that New York is an equal opportunity voter suppression state. Even rich, white Martha Stewart ran into trouble on primary day.

According to an article in Gawker, Miss Martha tweeted that when she went to vote, her name was missing from the voter lists, and she was forced to fill out an affidavit and other forms in order to cast her vote.

Stewart was far from alone in having difficulty.  Politico reports that there were five times as many voter complaints during Tuesday’s primary than were received during the 2012 elections. Because New York holds a “closed primary,” voters need to be registered as either Democrat or Republican in order to vote.  Nearly 3 million voters who registered as independent were denied ballots.

Martha Stewart was one of many who found that their names had disappeared from the voting lists. Although she had previously lost the right to vote while she was in prison for insider trading, this time the reason was less clear.


Stewart also tweeted that the many “snafus” and irregularities reporting during the primary make all voters feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.  The New York State attorney general agrees. He has begun an audit of the situation, hoping to find and fix the many issues in staffing and record keeping that lead to so many people being denied their voting rights.

We have to wonder if something will finally be done to fix things, now that a famous, rich white woman has been impacted.

Featured image by David Shankbone via Flickr. Available through Creative Commons Attribution License.

Karen is a retired elementary school teacher with many years of progressive activism behind her. She is the proud mother of three young adults who were all arrested with Occupy Wall Street. To see what she writes about in her spare time, check out her blog at "Empty Nest, Full Life"