NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- The Board of Election added an additional polling site in Manhattan amid a crush of early voters in the city this election season.
The site was added at Marymount Manhattan College on the Upper East Side to help alleviate long lines at Robert Wagner Middle School. The new site will only be open on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1.
There were close to 100 voters in line two hours before the polls opened at the middle school on Friday. Later in the morning, hundreds were in line despite a cold, soaking rain. Waits at the polling place have ranged from 2 to 6 hours on some days.
David Hirst decided to brave the miserable weather, hoping it would dampen turnout.
“This is actually my fourth attempt,” Hirst said. “I came Monday actually at 6 in the morning and it was already a 2 ½ hour wait. Tried at different times on a couple of other days—3 hours, 3 ½ hours.”
Christine and Scott Papp, who stood shivering under a golf umbrella on Friday morning, said the second site should have opened days ago.
“I think 120,000 people to this polling site, and that is the size of a lot of small cities in America, so it just doesn't make sense that they put that many people in one spot,” Scott Papp said.
The city’s early voting has topped 700,000 so far this election.
The Board of Elections has extended early voting hours this weekend: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday; 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday; and 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.
Doug Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Elections Board, said New York City has fallen "woefully short."
He himself has yet to vote thanks to long lines on the Upper West Side. Kellner tells WCBS 880's Steve Burns that the problem goes back once again to the city's Board of Elections.
"Many of the people who are there are not there with a commitment to efficient election administration. They have other agendas," Kellner said.
A recent New York Times reports found rampant nepotism at the board and Kellner said 20% of the people are doing about 80% of the work.
"What you have to do is address the current process for selecting the commissioners," he said.
Lines stretching for blocks could've been avoided if the Board of Elections added more polling sites, said Sen. Mike Gianaris, who pushed the board to add more locations in Queens ahead of the June primary.
"They initially planned only 7 voting sites in Queens and I told them that was insane. They since increased it to 17 or 18. But it's obviously still not enough and you would hope that the Board Elections would use its discretion to add more sites," Gianaris said. "Two million people with 17 poll sites is over 100,000 people per site so it's obviously unacceptable when we have an agency thats job is to facilitate voting and they're doing what they can to make it harder for people instead."
He is proposing legislation called the Make Voting Easy Act that would mandate one early voting site per 25,000 registered voters. In Queens that would mean 51 sites.
"Twice as many poll sites means half as long lines, three times as many poll sites means lines that are one-third as long," he said. "I certainly hope the new normal is that people are voting early and voting more often by mail. I don't hope that the new norm is that they have 2 or 3 hour long lines. That's the part they have to fix."