Earlier this week, we were met with the news that thousands of New York voters had been removed from the US electoral roll, despite being registered. With such a huge error facing the country’s voting system, how did social media highlight this?

In the borough of Brooklyn, more than 126,000 registered Democrat voters found that they had been stripped from the electoral roll when trying to cast their votes on Tuesday’s primary. This led to a probe into the New York State Board of Elections, where voting lists in Brooklyn were found to contain several errors, resulting in whole buildings and even blocks of voters removed from the voting list. Reasons given from the Board of Elections claimed that this was due to 12,000 moving away from the region, while 44,000 voter names had been moved to an “inactive” file after correspondence fell through. Another 70,000 were also marked as inactive, due to failure to vote in the past two elections or respond to cancellation notices. This removal of names is said to have come after a long-needed purge was conducted in November 2015, although according to state law, voters are generally only removed if they die, become a felon, or leave the state. This, it seems, would not account for the usually high number of removals in this case.

As a result, New Yorkers responded in outrage, stating that this mishap had undermined the whole voting process, and cast a shadow on their civil rights. On social media, and particularly Reddit and Twitter, complaints were rife. On Reddit, the largest Bernie Sanders subreddit forum supporting his campaign, resulted in over 1700 new posts written from frustrated voters, and a subsequent flurry of hotline complaints made as a result. In fact, the situation resulted in the largest volume of complaints made ever during an election. On Twitter, other related issues also arose, with users recognising the delayed opening times experienced at the Brooklyn polls.

The mess up forced many seemingly unregistered voters to sign an affidavit, with these users expressing their concern that this method of voting might not see their vote counted. Confusingly, there was much inaccurate information shared on social media about this, with the Bernie Sanders campaign reporting that they had witnessed a great amount of misinformed posts on Facebook and Twitter. These stated falsehoods such as the fact that all affidavit ballots would be counted due to the purging scandal. In fact, the Bernie Sanders campaign revealed there was a high chance these wouldn’t be acknowledged if the voter wasn’t marked as registered with a party before the purge was conducted. As a result of the misinformation on social media, voter turnout was higher, as was the completion of affidavit ballots- which unfortunately may have accounted for nothing.

However, while it seemed dubious that Democrat voters appeared to have been the only ones affected, Hilary Clinton was still victorious in the Brooklyn borough by almost 60,000 votes. Bernie Sanders though, was defeated, although there was no evidence to suggest that those voters removed from the role may have been his supporters. Still, the social media backlash continued, with many citing fraud, and also holding media influence responsible for the outcome.

Were you surprised by the news? And how do you think social media played a role in helping or exacerbating the situation? We’d love to hear your thoughts as always, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments our our Facebook page.