NYC officials say they'll investigate mass of problems in Tuesday's primary

 
 (UPI) -- New York City's comptroller is promising to audit the city's Board of Elections after reports surfaced of thousands of voters in Brooklyn possibly having been improperly removed from voter registration rolls in the months leading up to Tuesday's presidential primary.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said elections workers have failed to offer any explanation for why voter registration rolls saw 125,000 names drop off the list since November 2015 in the borough. During that time, Board of Elections CEO Michael Ryan said 63,000 names were added.

Stringer, a Democrat, cited the agency's "incompetence" after a deluge of complaints, running the gamut from polling stations that weren't open Tuesday morning to registration issues and machine malfunctions.

"Unfortunately in New York City, this is nothing new," Stringer said at a news conference Tuesday evening while voting was still going on. "The next president of the United States could very easily be decided tonight. And yet the incompetence of the Board of Elections puts a cloud over these results. It's time we clean up this mess."

Ryan said thousands of names are added and removed every year in New York City, but did not offer an explanation as to why the borough's registration rolls decreased by a net estimate of 62,000 voters between November and April.

The Board of Elections is permitted to move a voter to "inactive" status if they have not voted in several years. It was unclear whether or how many of the 125,000 names removed were as a result of that process.

"[There was a] report a couple years ago that said there were people on the lists who didn't belong there," Ryan told The New York Times on Tuesday. "Now we take people off the list who don't belong there ... and there's some blowback, criticism that we've done it inaccurately."

Stringer said Ryan's office has failed to offer "any adequate explanation" for the drop in voters.

"There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site," Stringer said.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio echoed Stringer's concerns, saying he'd heard claims that entire portions of the borough were omitted from the rolls, telling the Times it was possible there was "purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists."

The problems were not limited to Democrats specifically. One Brooklyn polling station opened nearly two hours late after poll workers failed to show up. Other locations reported broken ballot scanning machines. Voters were instead instructed to put their ballots in a slot and promised they would be scanned later when the machines were working. Conservative radio commentator John Burnett said on Twitter he was told he would have to wait for a Republican ballot when his Harlem polling place had run out.

Another common problem: Blue pens. The ballots in New York require black ink for the scanners to read voters' selections. Some polling places only had blue pens available, which causes the scanners to kick the ballot back to the voter without registering any of their choices.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said a statewide hotline set up for voters to report problems at their polling stations received 562 calls and 140 emails by midday Tuesday, four times the number of complaints received during all of voting in the 2012 general election. His office did not say how many of those came from New York City specifically.