Nov. 3 is the real deal for the contentious presidential election, and if you are not one of the 1.1 million New Yorkers who have voted early, you may want to read this.
Up to 1,200 polling sites are now open across the city until 9 pm, which you can find by inputing your address on the NYC Board of Elections website. If you are voting absentee, you can either take the ballot to a poll site and drop it off, or you can take it to the Post Office.
As long as it is postmarked for election day, Nov. 3, and all the signature fields are signed, the BOE will count your vote.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday assured New Yorkers that heading to the polls Tuesday would be safe, but urged them to be on the lookout for instances of voter intimidation.
“Now, we want people who haven’t yet voted either early voting or absentee to have all the information they need to vote in-person and we want people to know that it is safe. We want people to know that when you go out there, it will be safe and secure. We also want people to know that we will not accept any effort to intimidate voters in New York City,” he said. “The Election Observer Corps is going to be out there in force – over 500 volunteers, lawyers and city officials, people who are giving their time of themselves to make sure the election is accurate, safe, no one is intimidated, no one is harassed.”
The city will provide additional interpreters at 52 polling stations tomorrow to help native Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Yiddish speakers cast their votes on Election Day, officials said on Monday.
“Language should not be a barrier to civic engagement,” said Civic Engagement Chair and Executive Director Dr. Sarah Sayeed. “Voting is a commitment to yourself, to your community and our shared democracy. Make a plan to vote.”
Additional interpreters will be mostly serving polling sites in Brooklyn although some are set to work at sites across the five boroughs.
For more information on which polling sites have language assistance and for which languages, call 866-VOTE-NYC.
Long lines are expected throughout the day, despite the borough’s impressive turnout during early voting.
Brooklynites cast the most ballots during early voting, besting all four other boroughs with a total of 373,270 voters checking in at polling sites, according to the city’s Board of Elections.
BOE’s preliminary figures show that Kings County accounted for more than a third of all early votes in the city, which came in a total of 1,119,056 by Sunday evening.
Check back for continued coverage throughout the day.