April 3, 2016

Sanders Wins Nevada Caucuses

At the Clark County Nevada Democratic Convention it was determined that Sanders will have more delegates than Clinton for the state convention after all, though it was thought at the time of the initial caucuses that Clinton had more delegates.

The story is very confusing and acrimonious, but here are the essentials: There is a four person credentials committee who decides on who are legal delegates. Two are Sanders representatives and two are Clinton representatives. At the Convention, there was a great deal of disagreement between the two campaigns on the issue of who the legal delegates were. The Clinton campaign didn’t like the direction that the credentials committee was going, so they tried to have the Chairperson of the credentials committee, Christine Kramer, removed, and even called the police to have her arrested for trespassing. However, that effort failed when all 4 members of the credentials committee, including the two Clinton representatives, stood together to resist the effort. The police came, but they said they would not be arresting anybody.

April 1, 2016

New York Election Fraud: Is Arizona Happening Again?

According to a recent news article:

Huge problems plagued the Arizona primary earlier this week, with allegations of election fraud resounding across the Internet. People who said they were previously registered Democrat suddenly found their registrations inactive and couldn’t vote in the primary. Now people are discovering the same thing in New York.

What the article doesn’t say, perhaps because the writer is unaware of it, further investigation into the voter suppression in Arizona strongly suggested that it was targeted at Bernie Sanders. In an attempt to shed more light on the voter suppression in AZ, an attempt was made to identify as many voters as possible who were disenfranchised because they found out on Election Day that they were no longer registered as a Democrat, and find out who they intended to vote for. Other than a few whose voter preferences the investigation could not discover, 113 intended to vote for Sanders and 2 intended to vote for Clinton. Much anecdotal evidence from New York (there are also reports of it happening in Pennsylvania, but this article is just about New York) suggests that this voter suppression in similarly targeted at Sanders.

The article goes on to say that the New York Democratic Board of Elections Commissioner, Douglass Kellner, extended the registration deadline to March 25, so that anyone whose registration was purged could re-register. The article goes on to say:

Unfortunately, many people reported technical problems with the DMV site on Friday. If you’re listed as inactive or unaffiliated, you can still change your registration, but it won’t help in time for the primary.

In my opinion, the Commissioner’s “fix” to the problem is woefully inadequate. That is not only because of the “technical problems” with the website prevented people from re-registering, but because in all likelihood, the vast majority of voters whose registration was purged will not become aware of it until Election Day, when it will be way too late. The reports of purged voters in New York are coming from those who, suspicious about what happened in Arizona, re-checked their voter registration status. I doubt that more than a small fraction of voters actually re-checked their registration status.

I want to know: Since the purging of voter registration was the fault of the election system and not the fault of the voters, and because the website continued to have “technical problems” even after the purge, why stick with an arbitrary deadline? It seems to me that the only decent fix to this problem is to allow same day on-site registration in New York this year, at the very least for voters who present valid Democratic registration cards at the polls.


Consequences

Evidence strongly suggests that Bernie Sanders would have won the Arizona primary if not for the voter suppression there, especially the voter suppression that was targeted specifically at him. He continues to surge in polls everywhere. He is the only candidate in either Party with net positive favorability ratings. But he cannot win the nomination if his supporters continue to be purged of their voter registrations and little or nothing is done to stop it.

This kind of thing is outrageous for a supposed democracy. I ask Hillary and her supporters to join in the calls to stop this voter suppression and fix it immediately in states where it has already occurred but the election has not yet been held.