Campaign Finance Board's voter-guide fiasco errors are no laughing matter

New York Post

2 days ago

A near-$7 million bungle by the city Campaign Finance Board is fresh sign that an outfit with huge power over city elections is in dire need of overhaul — if not elimination.
The CFB's voter-outreach arm, NYC Votes, last month spent $6.85 million of taxpayer money mailing 3.5 million 'voter information' guides that were riddled with huge errors, from listing Mayor Eric Adams and four other non-candidates as on the ballot in the Democratic primary to falsely 'informing' the public about a Republican primary that doesn't exist.
It also left out two entire City Council races.
'It's an interesting error from a system that demands absolute perfection from candidates, where a one letter typo can cost a campaign tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees or even removal from the ballot entirely,' fumed Corinne Fisher to PoliticoNY; she's one of the candidates the guide falsely lists as on the ballot.
NYC Votes also managed to advertise the wrong date for the primary during at least four games at CitiField, Gothamist discovered. Maybe they think Mets fans shouldn't vote?
Or maybe the CFB should adopt a slogan from Casey Stengel's verdict on the Amazins: 'Can't anybody here play this game?'
The board says it'll mail out new guides with the correct info to all 3 million potential Democratic primary voters; we guess it won't worry about Republicans who rely on its bad info and head to the polls for a fictional race.
All this would be easier to laugh at if the Campaign Finance Board didn't have such vast and unaccountable power over city campaigns.
On Friday, it airily slammed the Andrew Cuomo campaign with a $675,000 penalty because it disapproves of the Cuomo website, following a $622,000 fine two weeks before over the same issue — namely, how an independent pro-Cuomo superPAC can use the site to figure out his chief issues.
And of course the board has summarily refused to allow the mayor any matching funds at all, crippling his re-election campaign over federal charges that have now been permanently deep-sixed.
Reminder: Back 2013, the CFB all but anointed Bill de Blasio the next mayor by denying funds to his most-similar competitor, John Liu.
And in 2001, it imperiously declared that there would be no additional campaigning in the primary elections after they had to be rescheduled when the planes hit the towers on the original Primary Day — a completely arbitrary decision that was conceivably key to Mike Bloomberg's victory that November.
If you're keeping score, that's two mayors out of the last three who arguably won thanks to this elected board whose decisions can at best be contested in court cases that won't be settled until long after any given Election Day — and it has already played a huge role in this year's contest, too.
Yet it can't even produce a reliable voters' guide: Surely, the Charter Reform Commission should be at least looking at some proposal to oversee or eliminate the CFB and the entire corrupt 'public campaign finance' system?
For the record: Primary Day is June 24, even for Mets fans.