Quietly, and with barely acknowledged change, if at all, by the mainstream media, Bernie Sanders has taken the momentum away from Hillary Clinton with sweeping victories in the last 6 primaries and caucuses.
With 88% of the vote counted in Hawaii as of this writing, he is the clear winner there: 70.6 to 29.2.
In the Democrats voting Abroad contest, completely overlooked by the mainstream media, it's Sanders with 9 delegates to Clinton with 4 (a further breakdown is not provided by the New York Times, unlike the other contests below). This contest's results were delayed for weeks, and just announced a few days ago...to no one's fanfare except the Sanders' campaign itself. But this serves now as contest 1 of the most recent 6 called.
In the Idaho Caucuses, with 100% reporting, it's Sanders with 78% (17 delegates) to Clinton with 21.2 (5 delegates).
In Utah's Caucuses, with 99% reporting, it's Sanders with 79.3% (26 delegates) to Clinton with 20.3% (6 delegates). Rich, Piute, and Beaver County have 0 districts reporting and make up the 1% remaining (more on this kind of undercounting in a moment).
In Washington State, which is larger than all but 5 of the remaining 22 states, and with 100% reporting, it's Sanders with 72.7% (23 delegates) to Clinton with 27.1% (8 delegates).
Note: The delegate counts in the latest contests are likely to increase substantially as the votes are finally tallied and delegate pledges are made later.
Caucuses are becoming more prevalent this year, with districts everywhere trying to save money. They severely undercount voters. I've seen districts with ballot stuffing and opportunities for repetitive counting, with no one checking ANY ID so a voter could vote in multiple districts, or even vote on multiple ballots in the same district. In some places, Democratic ballots have simply run out, preventing voting at all. It's a complete mess, and it explains why in small states like Idaho, there is such a lopsided Republican victory for Cruz that didn't show up in pre-primary polls.
The
Democratic side may be no better, plus the long lines and too few
machines cited in major states like Arizona which went heavily to Clinton, possibly because of over-representation from pre-election day voting, and even broken or fraudulently programmed machines.
Even Alan Grayson called this out in an email to his supporters:
Dear (recipient),Voter suppression/electoral manipulation. We saw it in Arizona on Tuesday, but it started long before then. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin once said, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."Stalin simply announced whatever voting results he wanted. Here, in the United States, we do things differently. As the ghost of Stalin might say: "The people who attempt to cast the votes in the United States decide nothing. The people who determine how many polling locations there will be, where they'll be, and how long they'll be open decide everything."We saw it this week in Arizona. We have seen it over and over again in Florida. Police roadblocks between black neighborhoods and the polls. Criminalization of voter registration efforts. Touchscreen machines where a vote for X magically becomes a vote for Y. Exclusion from the voter rolls because you have the same name -- the same name! -- as someone else who was convicted of a felony. (John Smith, you're screwed.) One or two voting machines for a college with 60,000 students. Butterfly ballots and hanging chads.But we here at the Grayson Campaign, we fight back against that....
It is a very major thing when a sitting Congressman questions the integrity of the voting process itself, even the actual machines used to count votes.
All of this benefits the status quo candidates, of course.
All of this benefits the status quo candidates, of course.
I've seen another thing, though it's a moving target and when I started tallying the results, the factors changed before I could finish. It seems like the contests are called by AP (which is used by most Mainstream Media) early with 1-8% of the votes uncounted, mostly in rural areas that normally go to Sanders. I started creating a table that showed this, but then a few days later, they caught up, but by then, of course, people aren't looking at the states that already had primaries over a week ago, so they could have missed the adjustments. This is sort of what the writer is saying here, because it is disproportionately counting those pre-election day votes and ignoring the election day votes that are more likely to swing to Sanders.
Whether
you're a Republican favoring the non-mainstream candidate Trump or a
Democrat favoring Sanders, or you just want honest elections, you ought
to be alarmed by the degradation of our primary process. In the quest to shave a few dollars off election costs, states are jeopardizing Democracy itself.
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