Met Museum To Serve As UES Early Voting Site, Lawmaker Says

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Metropolitan Museum of Art will serve as an early voting site for the June primary election, a lawmaker announced Tuesday, saying it would help ease the crowding that plagued other neighborhood sites last fall.

The polling place at The Met's Fifth Avenue building will be open from June 12–20 and again on Election Day, June 22, as New Yorkers cast their primary votes for mayor, City Council, district attorney and more.

It will serve about 46,000 voters who live nearby, according to Assemblymember Rebecca Seawright, who helped secure the site.

Seawright said she pushed for the site in order to avoid a repeat of last fall's debacle, where 118,000 early voters were assigned to the same location: Robert F. Wagner Middle School, the most overloaded site in the city.

"I met people that were waiting up to six hours to cast their vote," Seawright told Patch.

After threatening to sue the Board of Elections, Seawright brokered a deal last October to make Marymount Manhattan College an additional early voting site for the Upper East Side.

Looking ahead to this year, Seawright and a cohort of other East Side politicians wrote to the Met's president, Dan Weiss, asking if the museum could be a polling place.

They were initially rebuffed, forcing the lawmakers to draft a rebuttal letter. Finally, after visits by Board of Elections officials, which continued as late as Monday, the museum was deemed suitable — marking the first time in its 151-year history that it will serve this purpose, Seawright said.

Voters can find their early voting and Election Day poll sites at findmypollsite.vote.nyc.