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Eliot Spitzer failed to vote in last year’s presidential election — just four days after penning a column proclaiming “Why I Am Voting for Barack Obama,” The Post has learned.
Records filed with the city Board of Elections show that while some voters waited hours to cast their ballots, Spitzer was a no-show at his Upper East Side poll site on Nov. 6, 2012.
Nor did he submit an absentee ballot available to those who can’t vote in person. A spokeswoman said Spitzer couldn’t make it to the polls because he had to high-tail it to San Francisco to serve as a paid co-anchor of Current TV’s round-table election coverage.
At his side was former Vice President Al Gore.
“That’s why he didn’t vote. There was not time for him to vote or get an absentee ballot,” said the spokeswoman, Lisa Linden.
But election officials explained that Spitzer — like anyone else — had an opportunity to cast a last-minute ballot.
Any voter can show up in person at the local board office to fill out an absentee ballot up to a day before the election, according to a Board of Elections spokeswoman.
An absentee ballot sent by mail would have to be postmarked a week before Election Day.
If he had moved quickly, Spitzer could have gotten in just under the wire. Current TV issued a press release on Oct. 31 announcing its planned Nov. 6 election-night coverage, a full week in advance.
Just four days before the election, in an article posted on the Slate magazine Web site, Spitzer professed the importance of civic engagement and spoke of the crucial issues at stake in the presidential contest.
“We’ve heard all the promises, excuses, smart lines and grotesque misrepresentations. Now it’s time to choose,” Spitzer declared in the column.
“And the choice is easy. On one hand is a leader who saved us from sure fiscal disaster, watched over a recuperating economy, preserved our national security and guided our nation’s international relations in rough waters.”
By comparison, Spitzer called Republican candidate Mitt Romney a “supply-side Reaganomics disciple” and “former moderate governor who became a pawn of an increasingly radical Republican Party.”
A review of Spitzer’s 20-year voting record showed that he also skipped the ballot box in two other years — 2007 and 2003.
Spitzer did vote in the election years in which he was on the ballot — the 1994 Democratic primary for attorney general; his 1998 successful bid for that office his 2002 re-election as AG; and his landslide victory to become governor in 2006.