It has always been a challenge to find places where large numbers of people can assemble to vote. An article in the Brooklyn Times Union, October 3, 1919, pg. 8, describes the need for more voting locations in the city and reports a meeting of the Armory board to consider changing their laws to allow the use of armories as polling places. At that time, the board deemed the question was outside its jurisdiction and instead belonged to military authorities. Later, Brooklyn armories became common polling places, as depicted in this photograph inside the Bedford Avenue Armory in Crown Heights showing workers waiting for the count to get under way in 1943.

Here we have a view of the impressive crenellated exterior of the building. To this day armories still act as polling places.

In November 2020, the Park Slope 14th Regiment armory will be one of our Brooklyn early voting sites. This location usually serves as a YMCA.

Another elegant structure being used for early voting in 2020 is the Masonic Temple in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, at 317 Clermont Avenue. I personally voted early at the Masonic Temple in the 2020 primary and had a wonderful experience. The location was sparsely populated and everyone working there was gracious and efficient. I felt quite safe and look forward to using the early option for the general election. To find your early polling site you can consult VoteNYC.

This being the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States it is interesting to look back on the road to that achievement. Above is a 1913 suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue past the New York Public Library. You can see many of the marchers standing out in “Suffragette white.” New York granted women the vote on November 6, 1917. The following year, the Standard Union of September 3, 1918, p.1 reported women working the polls in a Brooklyn primary for the first time, a full two years before their sisters in some other states would gain the franchise. The article suggests that the presence of women at the polls created a welcoming atmosphere for new women voters. In 1920, approximately six months before the 19th amendment was ratified, the League of Women Voters (LWV) was founded to support the women’s vote. The League is officially nonpartisan as regards candidates and, after a century in existence, its website states it remains dedicated to encouraging “informed and active participation in government.” Originally, membership in the LWV was only open to women but in 1973 the charter was changed to include men.

Here we see women voters giving instruction in the use of a voting machine in the lobby of Namm’s department store. The sign is obscured but one can read: “L of W.V.” … educate women to become “intelligent voters.” In the slowly evolving patchwork of voting rights before full women’s suffrage, there were states that allowed women to vote in some elections, for example school elections, but not others. To offer those limited options Lenna R. Winslow filed a 1910 patent for a voting machine that was a booth with two doors, one for men and another for women. Each voter was given their gender-specific options on entry. Voting machines enjoyed a slow and gradual adoption in New York City. I was able to find a Brooklyn notice to amend the voting law to examine and adopt voting machines in 1899, and an announcement of the exhibition of voting machines in 1903. But the introduction of them in Brooklyn seems to have happened in 1926, as reported in an October 29, p.2 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, with an illustration and directions for their use.

The same essential design demonstrated by the L.W.V. can be seen here being used by the Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore in 1940 in Stuyvesant Heights. Voting was a much more decentralized process at that time. The dizzying list of polling places in the October 12, 1939, p.19 Brooklyn Daily Eagle shows how many different small businesses acted as voting sites. 225 Reid Avenue served as a polling site for a number of years, and we can see that business listed at different times as cleaner, bootblack and barber. You will not find this address in present day Brooklyn maps because Reid Avenue was renamed Malcolm X Boulevard in 1985.

We can see the vibrant civic life of New York City continuing in contexts other than high profile governmental elections. Here, a nurse at the Jewish Sanitarium and Hospital for Chronic Diseases helps patients to vote in their Patients Council election. The photo’s caption explains: “The council's aim is to improve the morale of the patients by stimulating interests, developing recreational programs, and providing entertainment for the patients.”

The right to vote is an important part of the union contract. Above, longshoremen exercise their right to choose their union officials, and in the next photo decide whether they will retain the “shape-up hiring system.”

Longshoremen – members of Local 327, International Longshoremen’s Association – queuing up at the Catholic Seamen’s Institute, 635 Hicks St., to cast their ballots on whether the shape-up hiring system should be retained. "Shape-up" hiring is a practice that we are still familiar with today. In the shape-up system, workers request employment each morning, and vie with fellow workers for the day’s employment, as opposed to a “rotary” hiring system where the work is distributed. Given the difference these hiring systems had on the quality of the lives of these workers it seems very just they should have a chance to choose between them. Making our voices heard is the bedrock of our democracy. We hope that these election stories will inspire all New Yorkers to join their fellow citizens this November to exercise their right to vote and be counted.