Sudden Changes To Local Poll Sites Alarm Residents Of Willoughby Walk, Kingsview, University Towers, And Farragut

The letters from the city Board of Elections (BOE) began arriving in the mail in early August, telling residents “your polling site has been changed.” And as word spread through Willoughby Walk and Kingsview Homes and Co-ops, and University Towers and Farragut Houses, the response from many residents — a large portion of them senior citizens — has often been equally unanimous: “this isn’t fair.”

For Joan O’Bryan of the Willoughby Walk Senior Retirees Group, the main problem with her building’s new polling site is the distance.

“I am dismayed over the fact that they changed it from 195 Willoughby’s lobby  to PS 270 because it’s very difficult for us to really get there,” O’Bryan said. “Although it doesn’t seem like a great distance, 51 percent of our residents are 60 years old or older — and half of those are 70 years and older.”

She explained further that what would be a five-minute walk for someone in good physical condition takes 10-15 minutes for seniors, longer if they have a walker or wheelchair.

“We’re a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) and I walked over there to see how it is,” she said. “The first problem is that we can’t walk across the gates at Pratt because they’re closed, so we have to walk around on a lonely, isolated walk. At night and in inclement weather, it could be unsafe, especially for seniors or those with small children and some kind of mobility issue.”

The second problem, said O’Bryan, is that early notice wasn’t given so that a more convenient location could be found.

“195 Willoughby is apparently not ADA-compliant (Americans With Disabilities Act), which is a good reason, but we were never given an opportunity to correct whatever problem it might have been,” she said. “We were just told we no longer qualified. Who does that?”

If asked to choose where she’d rather go to vote, Willoughby’s Katie Davis listed Pratt Institute as her top choice. However, Pratt officials reportedly told the BOE that they don’t have the room.

“[We’ve been] friendly neighbors all these years, working together and we used the red building right across from us, [where we ] used to meet and do stuff in the past,” said Davis. “I just think it’s wrong. It’s not even neighborly. When these institutions are in the community, we are supposed to work together.

“I’ve sent a letter to [elected officials, the BOE, Pratt President Schutte, and others, explaining to them why I’m up in arms about this,” Davis added. “I just urged them to go back and talk with Schutte and ask him to reconsider.”

Edwina Glasco of Kingsview Co-ops added that since their building does have wheelchair-accessible ramps, there’s an air of confusion over the official reason given for moving their poll site across Myrtle Avenue to the Ingersoll Community Center.

“Up until May/June, BOE was calling us to make sure we have our forms ready,” Glasco said. “We’d like some explanation. Is there something we have to do? We are a voting community and want to make sure that people still have the opportunity to get out and vote.”

Ironically, according to the city BOE, the new guidelines were recently enacted in “a concerted effort to increase the polling place accessibility for senior citizens and handicapped voters by removing physical barriers to the voting area(s)” and that instances of relocation have been necessary to create “barrier-free” polling sites.

However, they acknowledge that “problems remain at some sites,” so “voters who feel that their site is inaccessible may call the Voter Registration Unit of their local Borough office for information.”  The phone number for Brooklyn’s BOE office at 345 Adams Street is 718-797-8800.

According to the BOE, Willoughby Walk’s former polling sites don’t have ramps or enough space for voting, and Farragut Houses is too “cramped.”

Changing poll sites too frequently can also be a problem — for both voters and poll workers, noted Mary Andrews, president of the Farragut Tenants Association, who has served for years as a poll worker at her now-former poll site, until now located at the Church of the Open Door (201 Gold Street).

“[Our] new site will be in MetroTech, downtown somewhere, so I have to be there by 5am as a poll worker,” said Andrews. “And that’s traveling to somewhere I don’t know the situation. We have a lot of seniors who want to vote, so they will do what they can to get there, but you can’t keep changing sites.”

Election Day / Primary Day is Thursday, September 10. To find your polling site, use this handy tool.

What do you think? Have you had any polling site changes?