By ERIN EINHORN and DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Updated Friday, December 19th 2008, 2:55 AM
Egan-Chin/News
Caroline Kennedy has her sights on being the senator from New York, but hasn't voted much here since she registered in 1988.
City Board of Elections records show Kennedy has failed to vote in many elections since she registered in the city in 1988 - including votes for the Senate seat she hopes to fill and numerous Democratic faceoffs for mayor.
"It doesn't speak to a deep-felt commitment to the electoral process," Baruch College political scientist Doug Muzzio said when told of Kennedy's ballot breakdowns.
Records show Kennedy did not pull the lever for any of her fellow Democrats in city primary races for mayor in 1989, 1993 and 1997 and 2005, which Republicans went on to win three out of four times in the general election.
She was also AWOL for the primary and general elections in 1994, when Sen. Daniel Moynihan was running for reelection to the seat Kennedy hopes to hold.
Aides to Kennedy - who Thursday said she was running in part because this is no time to "sit out" - conceded Thursday night that at times the daughter of former President John F. Kennedy has done just that.
Most of the time, she voted, aides said. A review by The News found that of the 38 contested elections since 1988, Kennedy skipped about half, almost all of them primaries.
"Caroline Kennedy recognizes just how important it is to vote and has a very strong record of going to the polls," spokesman Stefan Friedman said. "She has not voted on a handful of occasions over the last two decades."
Thursday, Kennedy went to Harlem for a soul-food sitdown with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who, ironically, was Moynihan's Democratic opponent in 1994.
"I come at this as a mother, as a lawyer, as an author, as an education advocate and from a family that really has spent generations in public service," she said with Sharpton at her side outside Sylvia's, Harlem's famed soul-food mecca.
Inside, the two shared a lunch of grilled chicken and collard greens at the same table where Sharpton and Obama had dined in November 2007 - a meeting that was key to his presidential win, Sharpton joked with Kennedy.
"If she believes that," Sharpton quipped, "then I got some other things I can sell her in Harlem."
The sitdown was part of a round of informal chats Kennedy is holding with state leaders. On Wednesday, she barnstormed through Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.
Kennedy Thursday also met with Brooklyn Democratic Leader Vito Lopez at an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg.
Lopez is scheduled to formally back her bid for Senate today, a source close to him said Thursday night.
Gov. Paterson has sole authority to fill Clinton's seat, a job Attorney General Andrew Cuomo also is seriously considering. Paterson played coy Thursday when asked about Cuomo.
"We have talked about the Senate," Paterson said of the attorney general. "Our conversations, as are the conversations with anyone else, are private."
Mayor Bloomberg also dodged when asked about his staff's effort to promote Kennedy's candidacy.
"It's not my call," he told Barbara Walters on "The View." "If it was my call, I know exactly [whom I'd pick]," he added without elaborating.
Kennedy's more immediate problem may be explaining her voting record.
Records show she also took a pass on the 2002 gubernatorial primary as well as the general election, when Democrat Carl McCall took on incumbent Republican George Pataki.
Aides Thursday said that prior to 1988, Kennedy was registered in Massachusetts while a student at Harvard University. She later switched her voting address to her mother's old apartment on Fifth Ave., but apparently fell off the rolls completely sometime in the 1980s.
When she went to reregister in 1988 at her new Park Ave. home, she filled in "1984?", when asked the year she had last registered.
dsaltonstall@nydailynews.com
With Kenneth Lovett and Stephanie Gaskell
