Saturday, March 15, 2008

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.

February 20, 2008 | Read More: Mike Bloomberg | Bloomberg's allegation

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. ...

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