Bloomberg: "Fraud" Behind Low Obama Vote In New York

By DAVID B. CARUSO | Associated
8:32 PM EST, February 20, 2008

Over the past few days, evidence has emerged that the unofficial results released on election night may have slightly overstated Hillary Clinton's margin of victory in her home state.

Most of the attention has focused on 80 city election districts that reported receiving zero votes for Barack Obama while collectively logging thousands of votes for the other Democratic and Republican candidates.

New York City's Board of Elections said Wednesday that it had concluded that Obama actually had received a substantial number of votes in 55 of those districts.

The board said the blame for failing to report the tallies properly was split between its own poll workers, who read the results off the voting machines on election night, and city police officers, who enter the numbers into a city computer system.

Poll inspectors simply misread the numbers in 35 districts, while police made data entry errors in 20 districts, Board of Elections spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez said.

She chalked up the discrepancies to "human error" and stressed that the mistakes only affected the unofficial tallies reported to news organizations, not the formal vote counts.

Statistically, she said, the errors were small. Democrats cast 1.7 million votes statewide on Super Tuesday. Clinton walked to victory easily, taking 57 percent of the vote to Obama's 40 percent.

Nevertheless, an Associated Press audit of the returns in 78 of the districts where Obama received no votes revealed Wednesday that data entry errors were surprisingly common and raised questions about whether similar errors occurred in other parts of the city.

The AP examination found that New York Police Department personnel logging the returns from those districts incorrectly entered the numbers 5.2 percent of the time. Past audits of election results have indicated that the normal error rate is about 1.7 percent.

Because of those errors, Obama's tally in those districts was understated by 1,073 votes. Clinton's results were understated by 416 votes. Three other Democratic candidates were reported to have received 767 more votes than they actually got.

There were errors on the Republican side, too, but most of the discrepancies were in the single digits.

The mistakes appeared to be scattered and have no clear pattern that would indicate foul play.

"People are people. Everybody makes mistakes," said Bob Brehm, a spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections.

He acknowledged that improvements could be made in the system, but he said the goal of election night reporting is to give people a general idea of the results, not produce ironclad numbers.

"People want to know who won and who lost," he said, "and they want to know as quickly as they can after 9 o'clock, when the polls close."

Police spokesman Paul Browne said the department was still analyzing the data to determine whether mistakes were made or improvements were warranted.