'Is it too late?!': From Baldwin to Bayport, evening voters rush to their poll site
Isaiah Blemur, 22, was eager to cast his ballot in Baldwin on Tuesday.
About an hour before polls closed at the Lenox School polling site in Baldwin, just off a still, silent street, one eager voter raced down the block.
“Is it too late?!” he yelled out his car window. “No!” someone replied.
Voters who just got off work trickled in and out of the school. Among them was David Sayles, a pastor who moved from Brooklyn to Baldwin 33 years ago. For Sayles, recently-shuttered SNAP benefits and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were top of mind.
“I have family in Brooklyn, and they literally have to walk around with their passports. They gotta walk around with their birth certificates,” said Sayles, 58.
Isaiah Blemur, 22, who recently graduated from NYU, was excited to cast his hometown ballot on Tuesday. Most of what he’d learned about Nassau’s races came from spiteful ads, he said.
“There would be times where I’ll be getting my hair braided, I’d be at this lady’s house, and she had Fox News open so I’d see a lot of pro-Blakeman ads,” Blemur said.
“There were a lot of words being thrown at people. … The ads are like, ‘This person did that, so you should vote for me,’ instead of, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do."
Charlie Burst, 60, of Bayport, described a civic duty echoed by many voters Tuesday after he cast a ballot at Bayport-Blue Point High School.
“You can’t complain unless you vote,” he said. “You have to have some kind of say.”
He said the statewide proposition to allow skiing facilities on state forest preserve land was of particular interest to him.
“I think it would be cool to expand the Olympics,” he said, referring to the Mount Van Hoevenberg Olympic Sports Complex in Essex County.
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