SITE MAP Looking for your poll site? Don’t bother with the Board of Elections’ website: Their poll-site finder is under construction—as it has been since 1998. You’re better off calling Helpline, run by the New York Public Interest Research Group, or hitting an independent website (J. Nanos)

DISABLING DEMOCRACY Lack of handicapped access is always a problem in New York, but tomorrow it could undermine democracy, too. Nearly half of 34 Manhattan poll sites surveyed during the September primary had barriers that could have stopped some of the city’s 1.5 million disabled voters from casting ballots at the polls, according to inspections by Center for Independence of the Disabled, NY. Impediments ranged from inaccessible entrances to a lack of signs to direct voters to accessible ones to obstacles in hallways. CIDNY’s been pressing the Board of Elections to make changes, like training poll workers in how to help keep entrances accessible. They’re meeting with some success, if perhaps more slowly than advocates would like. If nothing else, John Ravitz, executive director of BOE, has promised to fix any barriers reported to him on election day within an hour. CIDNY is hoping for the best. When a disabled person runs into problems entering the building, it can be frustrating, said Lunetha Lancaster of CIDNY. “For some people, it stops there,” she said. “They go home.”(S. Unke)

THE POOR VOTE, TOO When the smoke clears on Wednesday, newly electeds will face a host of policy conundrums—and a new report aims to bring the opinions of low-income New Yorkers front and center. Most notably, a policy consensus emerges across class lines: Poor, moderate- and upper-income New Yorkers all give a thumbs-up to raising the minimum wage and expanding education options for welfare-to-work clients. And Gotham’s affluent support raising taxes to fund public schools more than their poorer brethren. It’s useful information to know, said Nancy Rankin of the Community Service Society, which commissioned the report. The aim was “to give people some hard data to use for policymaking and advocacy,” she said, “rather than just relying on anecdotal stories.” (M. Chen, T. McMillan)