(Middle East Eye) Arabs and Muslims in a small town in upstate New York may have been targeted during June’s primary elections, as hundreds of absentee ballots that were disqualified belonged to people with Middle Eastern-sounding names.
Of the more than 200 absentee primary ballots that were disqualified in Lackawanna, a town in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area, all but one had an “overtly Muslim/Middle Eastern sounding name,” according to a national Muslim rights organisation that is now calling for an investigation.
The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in a press release on Monday, said attorney Peter A. Reese, a longtime Democratic activist from the area, had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for absentee ballots with “filed objections.”
