The New York City Campaign Finance Board denied mayoral race frontrunner Andrew Cuomo more than $2.5 million in public matching funds Tuesday, dealing an unexpected and significant blow to his campaign.
In a brief meeting at its Manhattan headquarters, the board’s members voted to deny the former governor the critical funds because his campaign had failed to furnish the CFB with some identifying information about the donors whose contributions it had hoped to match.
Cuomo campaign spokesman Rich Azzopardi said the board informed his team about the error last Friday. He didn’t immediately confirm what piece of identifying information had been left off, but blamed the issue on a “technical software error” by a vendor Cuomo’s campaign uses to process donations for public matching.
Azzopardi said Cuomo’s campaign has since “fully addressed the software issue” and will furnish the board with the missing information within a week. To that end, he said the Cuomo campaign expects to get the full matching funds payout during the board’s next disbursement on May 12.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (left) and Rich Azzopardi (right). (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News; Obtained by NYDN)
The matching funds blunder comes after Cuomo’s team said last month it had expected to get north of $2.5 million this week after raising more than $1.5 million in private funds in the two weeks following his March 1 campaign launch. The denial of the funds comes as the campaign season is really kicking into gear this month, with June’s Democratic mayoral primary looming just over two months away.
Azzopardi said Cuomo’s campaign has since last month raised another $1 million, putting his total private haul to date at $2.5 million from more than 4,100 individual contributors.
Mayoral candidates need significant amounts of cash to staff their campaigns, pay for ads and engage in other political activities. The city’s public matching funds program is a key component for most candidates, as it uses public cash to match any donation they receive from a city resident at an 8:1 ratio up to $250.
The Cuomo campaign’s matching funds flub comes after the ex-gov has in the past few days reeled from back-to-back public snafus.
On Saturday, the Cuomo campaign inadvertently sent out a message to journalists asking for identifying information and other personal documentation. That message, the campaign confirmed, was meant to go out to campaign donors who needed to provide more info in order for their contributions to become eligible for public matching.
Then, on Monday, the Cuomo team faced backlash after it was revealed his campaign used ChatGPT to write parts of his housing plan, which also initially included a number of garbled sentences. To boot, his campaign sent out a press release on Monday announcing endorsements from two influential unions that misspelled the last names of the presidents of both labor groups.
Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 amid sexual misconduct accusations he denies, is polling as the favorite to win the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary.
This story will be updated