Six NYU buildings, including three student residence halls, will serve as sites for New Yorkers to vote in today’s presidential election .
The polling places — located at Brittany Hall, Alumni Hall, Palladium Hall and three locations in the Washington Square Village — will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. The New York City Board of Elections chooses the voting locations and assigns residents one site based on their address.
University spokesperson Joseph Tirella said that the BOE designates polling sites according to their capacity to host large crowds. He added that the university encourages all members of the NYU community to vote, and that it has requested faculty “be flexible” today to accommodate the occasion.
The BOE requires each polling location to meet standards for privacy, noise level and environmentalism. Politics professor Rahsaan Maxwell told WSN that while concentrated polling locations increase the voter turnout in a neighborhood, there is a financial “tradeoff” with distributing sites across the city.
“People study inequalities in access to polling stations to understand which communities are underserved and potentially discriminated against,” Maxwell said in an email statement to WSN. “In an ideal world, everyone would be able to walk in and vote in a few minutes — but it would cost too much money to set up that many polling stations.”
Voters can access the BOE’s online map to see wait times at polling locations across the city, which Tirella said have decreased with the onslaught of more than one million early voters.
New York state passed a law in 2022 mandating that all colleges with at least 300 registered voters enrolled must have a polling place on campus or nearby. Prior to the law’s enactment, some New York colleges were split into multiple voting districts or had to travel to reach a site.
In 2020, just one year after early voting was approved in the state, NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts was one of 16 sites in Manhattan where voters could cast their ballots ahead of the election. NYU has consistently hosted designated polling places for decades.
Correction, Nov. 5: A previous version of this article stated that registered voters in New York are required to bring photo identification and documents proving their address to their assigned polling site. The article has been updated and WSN regrets the error.
Contact Rory Lustberg at [email protected].
