Genghis:

It's a political ploy. Bloomberg justifiably regards the Board of Elections as a truly incompetent bureaucracy, riven by political feuds, and staffed by the worst sort of partisan hacks. He thinks if he can gain control, he could clean things up, and make the elections run smoothly. And he's correct on all accounts.

The poll workers in NYC are poorly trained. With the dearth of Republicans, and the requirement that each site be staffed by a member of each party, there's a remarkable population of Harlem retirees who register with the GOP so that they can cash in every election day. That's just one example of how partisanship screws up the process. There are a host of others.

So Bloomberg alleges fraud, seizing on what's almost certainly just gross ineptitude to make his case for mayoral control. But here's the problem with that argument. Although Bloomberg might be the sort of technocrat unlikely to abuse such authority, the same cannot be said of all NYC mayors. Can you imagine what elections would have looked like in the Big Apple if Rudy Giuliani had direct control of the electoral machinery? It gives me the willies just to think about it.

"Voter fraud?" Hillary Clinton received zero votes in several precincts too, with Obama receiving all the votes. So did both Clinton and Obama operate fraudulent voting practices in the precincts?

So what if Hillary received zero votes as well.

That's not the point.

The 2000 election was riddled with voter fraud. Watch this startling video of the programmer testifying how he did it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-YXvxYbck&feature=related

The point is we want fair elections.

If Bloomberg wants to bring attention to something for political gain, fine.

If it will help keep elections fair, so what if he raises the issue for the wrong reasons.

Finally had a chance to review my own post. I hate it when works gets in the way of my TPM time. A little research shows that as usual, flyonthewall is correct. Bloomberg's battle to reform the board of elections has been going on for a while. Here's an article about it from last november:

http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/2768

And in January, the mayor said:

Unfortunately, a Charter Revision Commission can't affect an area that desperately needs modernization: The Board of Elections, perhaps the only agency that still has the party bosses directly calling the shots. But this year, we will work with Citizens Union to build a nonpartisan coalition that unites the left and the right around a very basic idea: Hiring should be based on merit, not party ties. 2008 is the 130th anniversary of the death of Boss Tweed. Let's also make it the year we finally put to rest his style of politics.

Here's a more complete article about his post-election comments:

Bloomberg said, "This is just an outrage," and decried the Board of Elections for being a "partisan patronage organization": "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 defies credibility. Bloomberg also sniffed, "If you want to call it significant undercounting, I guess that's a euphemism for fraud.""

Portrayed this way, it doesn't sound like he's knows something but is rather trying to score political points in order to establish his objective of election board reform, as fly suggests.

I of course agree with fly that the elections shouldn't be under mayoral control, but is that what he's proposing? I would think it should be an independent organization affiliated with the state. Here's what wikipedia has to say about the NYC board of elections:

The New York City Board of Elections meets once a week at 32 Broadway, New York NY, on the Sixth Floor. By law, there are ten commissioners, two from each of the five boroughs of New York City. One of these two is from each of the two parties whose candidates got the most votes in the last gubernatorial election. Since the top two candidates in the last election represented the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party get five representatives each on the Board of Elections. The New York State Board of Elections is a different body which meets in Albany.

This does sound to me like a strange way to run elections. Why is there a separate board for the city in the first place?

And for the record, this is not, for me, an Obama-Clinton thing. There were indeed discrepancies both ways, as BevD points out, and besides, the number of affected votes is not sufficient to impact the convention.