New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign has phone numbers for hundreds of thousands of New York City voters. Each will get an automated phone call in the next week that is narrowly targeted to appeal to them, urging them to get out and vote. It is one of the highly meticulous ways that the billionaire mayor’s campaign is using its extensive voter database to contact New Yorkers in the days leading up to the election on Nov. 3.Automated calls to get out the vote aren’t new, but the specificity being used by the Bloomberg operation has never been done at the municipal level.
Campaigns typically record fewer than 10 such calls. Bloomberg officials estimate they will have 75 different calls, reaching 890,000 people to remind them to vote.
His opponent, mayoral candidate Bill Thompson, was fined nearly $126,000 for putting up campaign posters on city property. City rules bar candidates from hanging posters and fliers on public property and the Sanitation Department says its workers regularly rip down unauthorized material.
So far, the Thompson campaign has been ticketed 1,677 times over such postings.
Campaign spokesman Mike Murphy suggested that incumbent Mayor Mike Bloomberg was behind the ticket-writing effort. Sanitation officials deny that charge.
Bloomberg’s campaign has been fined too, but just 70 times this year.
Thompson was sworn in as New York City’s 42nd Comptroller on January 1, 2002 and began his second term on January 1, 2006.
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