Newly revealed communications between Andrew Cuomo’s team and the Campaign Finance Board shed more light on how his mayoral campaign missed out on matching funds. The CFB had decided at the end of its last funding cycle on April 15th that as things stood, the former governor’s campaign was not eligible for the additional resources of the program, which offers an 8-to-1 match in public financing for every dollar raised by a campaign if it’s in compliance with the Board’s rules. Cuomo campaign spokesman Rich Azzopardi said at the time that their denial was due to a “technical software error” in their donations collection system which they have since resolved, and that they had been warned by the Board of the issue just days prior on April 11th. However, according to the emails between the campaign and the CFB obtained by the New York Post, Cuomo’s team was made aware of the issue much earlier than Azzopardi had previously indicated.
As early as March 3rd, only two days after Cuomo officially announced his candidacy, the CFB cautioned that the campaign should not accept donations through phone tap systems like Google Pay or Apple Pay, as each donor’s address and payment method would have to be verified separately in documentation known as “affirmation letters” provided by the campaign. The Post details how this was conveyed to Cuomo’s team by the CFB “multiple times” over the course of “months-long correspondence” between the two. Cuomo campaign officials reportedly admitted to the CFB that they “weren’t set up” to gather this information while using those payments systems, but that they were going to forge ahead nonetheless.
What followed was the email from the CFB on April 11th telling Cuomo that such donations, while not running afoul of campaign finance law, would not be eligible for the city’s matching funds program administered by the Board “due to the lack of compliance with the requirement that the contributor actively agrees to an online affirmation statement.” This is what Azzopardi told the Daily News at the time was a “technical software error,” which the campaign tried to quickly rectify with a mass email to donors asking for information over the weekend before the April 15th deadline, but to no avail.
The newly revealed correspondence reported by the Post shows that Cuomo’s campaign even asked the CFB to reverse its decision after the fact on April 16th. The Board’s campaign advisor, however, was unmoved, saying that they “looked back at [their] correspondence” on the matter and pointed to the multiple warnings about the rules for matching funds.
Other communications show that the campaign was still having trouble gathering affirmation letters to render their payments eligible for the CFB’s program days after its April 15th ruling, raising questions as to whether Cuomo will qualify for the matching funds by the time the Board renders a decision for its following disbursement on May 23rd.
