The modest number of New Yorkers who bothered to vote Tuesday encountered short lines and a good number of busted voting machines, officials said. The problem hit Brooklyn’s 52nd Assembly District hard, where 70 machines at 21 poll sites were out of commission all morning. Voters had to fill out emergency affidavits. Michael Ryan, executive director of the city Board of Elections, said the machines in these neighborhoods — including Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill and Prospect Heights — were improperly set up. “We traced the issue back to a technician who improperly set up the backup memory device,” Ryan said, noting that all the machines were back up and running by 11 a.m. Ballots in Chinese were mistranslated, swapping text for one proposition measure with another.
Asian voters encountered mistranslated ballots that had them voting on the wrong referendums at sites in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Woodside, Queens, said Glenn Magpantay, attorney for the Asian American Civil Rights Group.
Somehow the translated text of Question 4 regarding land use in the Adirondaks somehow wound up as text for Question 5 about a land swap involving a mining company. “I can’t speak to how they missed it and how it got through the proofing process, but it did,” acknowledged Ryan of the Elections Board.
At another site in Flushing, Queens, poll workers told voters the back of the ballots — where all five referendums were printed — were told “don’t worry about the back, it’s not that important,” said Mapantay.
Full Article: NYC Elections 2013: Broken voting machines, mistranslated ballot measures plague low-turnout election – NY Daily News.