November 4, 2008, 1:05 pm
Tim Robbins Faces Mix-Up at Polling Place
By Nicholas Confessore AND Sewell Chan

Updated, 4:42 p.m. The actor Tim Robbins looked dejected and annoyed around 10:30 a.m. on Election Day, as he was sitting in a folding chair at the McBurney YMCA at 125 West 14th Street, one of the more than 1,300 polling places throughout New York City....


Mr. Robbins said he “never in a million years” imagined that he would be asked to fill out an affidavit ballot. He does not trust provisional ballots, he said, because of research by Mark Crispin Miller and other scholars who have showed that such ballots are sometimes lost or discarded.

“Do the math on this one,” Mr. Robbins said, adding that a poll worker had told him 40 voters at the same polling site had had the same problem — with no apparent explanation. “It bears looking into that this might be a random elimination” of voters from the rolls, he said....

Paul G. Feinman, a Civil Court judge who was standing by to hear challenges from voters denied access to the polls, ruled that the board had to allow Mr. Robbins to vote. As of 1 p.m., Mr. Robbins was making his way back to the McBurney YMCA to cast his ballot.

Apart from mix-ups like the one Mr. Robbins encountered, city election official have acknowledged that many voters — up to 30,000 in New York State, by some estimates — had been removed from the voter rolls. Officials at the city’s Board of Elections said the names were removed only after the voters failed to verify their residence. Mr. Robbins did not appear to have been one of the affected voters.

Mr. Robbins was hardly the only voter to go to the Board of Elections office at 200 Varick Street to assert their right to vote.