Bloomberg's allegation Against Board of Elections

Politico.com, February 20, 2008

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg yesterday alleged "fraud" in the unofficial count of New York City's votes, which left Obama with zero votes in 80 election districts.

"If you want to call it significant undercounting, I guess that's a euphemism for fraud," he said.

This contradicts what some familiar with the system thought, which was that it's within the range of error for the sloppy, unofficial count.

Bloomberg's spokesman, Stu Loeser, reiterated the charge in an e-mail, in which he also made clear that the charge was part of the mayor's local campaign to take the Board of Elections out of the control of the local political parties.

There are plenty of people arguing that the same error could have been made by mistake more than 80 times (and counting!), but the mayor is less sanguine. Certainly, if the system for administering elections was based on competence (and if the special-interest induced gridlock in Albany hadn’t prevented the State from certifying new machines some time in the last 40 or more years), someone might have noticed that there’s a problem where Sen. Obama apparently got no votes in areas where he clearly had a lot of support.

Bloomberg controls the police department, and I asked if he planned an investigation. Loeser said he didn't think there was actually a legal issue at stake in the preliminary, unofficial vote counts.

Anyway, we'll have a clear sense of the scale of the discrepency when the state gets an official count. And the Harlem results, at least, are unlikely to swing the delegate count; Clinton won the district by 4 percentage points and split the delegates anyway.

But it's a pretty dramatic allegation. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention.