New App to Help Voters Expose Trouble at the Polls

By SAM ROBERTS

A new app that lets voters flag polling-place irregularities will be tested at the primaries on Thursday and, if it works well, will be rolled out citywide for the November general election.

The program, PollWatchUSA, enables voters to report in real time if they are experiencing undue delays, having trouble getting or casting a ballot, or being subjected to harassment or intimidation.

“New York is so huge, it's impossible to recruit enough volunteers to staff polling places where there might be problems,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause New York, who challenged engineers to devise such a program at a Personal Democracy Forum at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism last spring. “This app enables us to crowdsource instead of relying on a limited number of volunteers or a call-in hot line.”

The application at pollwatchusa.org allows anyone with a smartphone to identify their polling place (either automatically, by sensing their location, or after typing in their ZIP code) and to report on long lines or other deterrents to voting. It was developed by Volkan Unsal, a software engineer; Jeremy Canfield, a service designer at Reboot; and Kathryn Peters, a co-founder of TurboVote.

“This will allow small groups and dedicated citizens' organizations to be voter advocates for a better-functioning political process,” Ms. Peters said.

PollWatchUSA comes along as the city's often-embattled Board of Elections is being criticized again, following slow tallying of the June Congressional primaries and a tongue-lashing last month by the City Council, which raised questions about its ability to quickly report election results.

In addition to allowing people to report impediments to voting quickly and easily, the application maps election trouble spots and allows observers, from the news media or from good-government groups like Common Cause, to alert the Board of Elections and to dispatch their own monitors to affected polling places.

On Sept. 13, the app will be available for the Democratic primary between State Senator Adriano Espaillat and his challenger, Assemblyman Guillermo Linares, in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, as well as for a party district leadership race in the 50th Assembly District in Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn.

The monitoring and advocacy group LatinoJustice PRLDEF will have a dozen or so volunteers posted at polling sites Thursday in Washington Heights and the Bronx equipped with the app.

“Our hope is to be able to use the crowdsourcing feature for poll monitoring so that we can assess any language, intimidation or other issues as they arise and address those problems by dispatching volunteers to those stations,” the group said in a statement. “We will use the data to better prepare pol ling stations for the general election in November.”

Ms. Lerner said: “We hope it will help empower voters to feel they have a strong voice in making sure elections are run right and to speed the response of addressing problems on Election Day. The long-term goal is that voters can be proactive and not rely solely on political organizations or candidates.”

Polls are open on Thursday, Sept. 13, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. To report problems to the city Board of Elections, call 866-VOTE-NYC (866-868-3692). To find out about your polling place or to see if there is a contest in your district, or for other questions, go to the board's Web site, http://vote.nyc.ny.us.