Team Cuomo’s Latest Cheap Trick

Students who got Gov. Cuomo’s Excelsior Scholarships may have an easier time paying their college bills, but who knew there’d be political strings attached?

Turns out the scholarship kids have been getting calls from Cuomo campaigners, asking them to endorse the gov in ads by describing how the awards helped them.

By law, the government and universities have to keep students’ personal information, such as what scholarships they get, confidential. Using such info for political gain is an outrageous infringement on the kids’ privacy — not to mention, illegal.

Team Cuomo denies any foul play. It claims it got the kids’ names and phone numbers from a public list of students invited to the gov’s 2018 State of the State speech. Yet that’s still playing dirty. Just because someone wins a Cuomo-instituted scholarship doesn’t mean he or she must help the gov politically or can even be approached for support by his campaign.

“I was a little surprised,” Nikita Losi, 19, told The Post. “I didn’t want my name associated with that.” Losi backs Cuomo’s foe, Marc Molinaro, for governor.

But the calls fit well with similarly sleazy moves by Team Cuomo — such as its attempts to inflate the number of Cuomo’s small donors by double-counting multiple donations from family members of campaign staff. Or his disgraced former aide Joe Percoco’s use of a taxpayer-funded phone to campaign for Cuomo in the 2014 election.

Cuomo, who’s leading Democratic challenger Cynthia Nixon 59 percent to 23 percent in a poll this week, couldn’t really be so desperate to build his margin that he’d resort to such cheap tricks. Could he?