Everything’s up to date in New York City – except its Board of Elections.
Which is why Mayor Bloomberg is quite right to protest the recorded-vote irregularities in the unofficial tallies of the Feb. 5 presidential primary.
Some 80 election districts with significant numbers of black residents recorded zero – none, zip, nada – votes for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton.
That’s just not believable, to put it mildly. Not only has Obama been drawing upward of 80 percent of black voters across the country, but adjoining districts registered heavily for him.
The Board of Elections blithely blames human error for the “significant undercounting.”
Bloomberg was having none of it: “I guess that’s a euphemism for fraud.” He went further: “[The BOE is] the last openly, outright, pure, partisan patronage organization we have in this state and in this city.
“What they do is hire on the basis of politics – and obviously the people that they have aren’t as competent as you would like, because the results that they reported just defy credibility.”
Reform group Citizens Union wrote Gov. Spitzer Tuesday urging that he and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo open an investigation into the undercounting.
Whether this was overt fraud – later in the week, Mayor Mike characterized the poor count as “misleading everybody” – or bizarre human error, the status quo is unacceptable.
This is hardly a one-time glitch; these errors are frequent – sometimes in primaries, sometimes in general election.
The BOE – as Mayor Bloomberg noted – is institutionally corrupt in its current incarnation.
A fix is overdue.