New York Primary: Bloomberg Alleges Fraud in City Vote Count

[JackRiddler]

New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02202008/news/regionalnews/mike_claims_vote_fraud_98436.htm

MIKE CLAIMS VOTE 'FRAUD'
By DAVID SEIFMAN

February 20, 2008 -- Mayor Bloomberg charged yesterday that "fraud" was behind the unofficial results in the New York Democratic presidential primary that produced zero votes for Barack Obama in some districts.

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

Unofficial tallies on election night gave Obama no votes in 78 out of more than 6,000 election districts.

At "Politico," a slick site-for-suits I never saw before, a blogger named Ben Smith got a statement from Stu Loeser, Bloomberg's spokesman.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0208/Bloombergs_allegation.html

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."

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.

(MORE AT LINK)

[HeraldSquare212]

1. Bloomberg: The Struggle to Stay Relevant

[greyl]

2. "unofficial vote counts" & "unofficial results"

Actual results do vary.
There's at least one thread here at DU (by Mr. Wiggles) that gets to the bottom of it.
Bloomberg is a dingleberry.

[JackRiddler]

4. Care to link? I'm interested.

[greyl]

5. Sorry, I looked for a few minutes earlier to edit it in and couldn't find it.

Now, here it is.
Post #20 seems to make a lot of sense, but I haven't confirmed it yet.

[JackRiddler]

6. Yes, post 20 in that thread does make sense.

Which doesn't prove it quite - you understand in the atmosphere of fraud potential (a perennial in democracies, and certainly more than ever in the era of Bush and Florida and Diebold), these things should be investigated and settled.

Clinton being in the first position on the ballot and Obama being in the fifth, with Biden second and he and the other former candidates often getting zero votes, it might be a simple case of mistaken attributions of Biden's or Kucinich's zero to Obama in the tabulation. But in that case, in the same precincts, one of the zero candidates should have gotten the Obama votes in the mistaken preliminary tally. That can be tracked down and clarified. (I can also think rogue Clinton partisans would think it funny to pretend they made this mistake, since it looks innocent enough and forgivable when clarified. If all or most of these precincts turn out to be in one neighborhood, that would be an indicator of some kind of organized disruption, or someone's idea of a prank.)

Bloomberg shouldn't mouth off about it - it's on him to use his resources to look into it quietly, and then present the case one way or another. It's hard not to imagine his talk has a political design, and not investigating it leaves it in the air as a cloud for him to exploit.

At least New York doesn't have DREs where the whole thing can be fixed in the programming and no one could prove anything...

[greyl]

7. "It's hard not to imagine his talk has a political design..."

I thoroughly agree.

[Blue State Bandit]

3. These statements show us something...

He won't run as an Indie if Obama get's the nod.

He will if Clinton does.