How To Vote in New York City Today

Big changes, civic-minded friends! The polls are open-and they’ll remain open until 9 p.m.-for today’s primary election. We hope you’re planning to vote! And we’ll have a voter guide later today totally not have a voter guide today-vote your conscience!- but first, the technical details. You can find your New York State polling place here. Even if you’re accustomed to your polling place, today you’ll find big changes! The ballots look pretty similar to what you’re used to but it’s a return to junior high school, because now we will use the exciting, time-honored technology of, pretty much, the bubble-scantron test. You remember how to fill in bubbles, right? The ballot you receive after you sign in-in its glamorous “privacy envelope”-will be in four languages and difficult to read in any of them! So, working by hand in your little station, you will fill in the bubble for your candidate of choice. You may instead provide a write-in candidate. You may not do both, nor may you select multiple candidates in the same race, nor may you write or mark outside the bubbles, or your ballot will be discarded. When you are done selecting your choices, you will then get in line for the scanning portion of today’s test. There you will feed your ballot into The Machine and it will either accept or reject your ballot. Perhaps you have done a good job and The Machine will reward you with a thank you. Perhaps not! Instead it may say there is a problem, such as that your ballot is “over voted,” in which case you should take your ballot back and fix it, by choosing the red button that says “don’t cast,” even though The Machine will give you a choice to let you submit it anyway. Here is a vaguely handy video that walks you through the new system, which we’re sure will just go swimmingly. Good luck with all that!