Bernie Lost 553,000 Votes to California Dem Party Rules
By Greg Palast, Greg Palast's Blog
15 March 20
In February, California mailed 3.7 million primary ballots that, to the
astonishment of many who received them, excluded the presidential
candidates. These ballots do have candidates for all other primary races,
including for Congress, but not the race for president.
Within this mountain of primary ballots, artifacts of California's arcane
and complex voting system, lies the potential to cripple the campaign of
Senator Bernie Sanders, the favored candidate among independent voters.
Particularly at risk of losing their vote are 18-to-24-year-olds and Latinx
voters, groups that strongly favor "Tio Bernie". A quarter of independent
voters, more than 1 million people, are Latinx, according to the Public
Policy Institute of California.
Sanders, as expected, won the plurality of California's votes, but he could
well be shorted out of hundreds of thousands of votes and scores of
delegates.
How did this happen? While Californians, including independent voters, vote
overwhelmingly for Democrats in general elections, and 5.3 million Golden
State voters register "NPP", no party preference.
These 5 million independents legally have the right to vote in the
Democratic primary, but the Democratic party created an inscrutable obstacle
course for them to do so, one that amounts to another type of voter
suppression.
The problem begins with a postcard.
Last autumn, all 5 million NPP voters were mailed a postcard allowing them
to request a ballot with the Democratic party presidential choices. However,
as many states have learned, postcards with voter information largely look
like junk mail and get thrown out.
If the independents don't respond to the postcards, they get a ballot
without presidential choices. But they have one more chance to vote for a
candidate in the primaries: at the ballot box.
At the polling station, though, things remain confusing. According to rules
set by the national Democratic party, the independent voters have to bring
in their NPP ballot to the polling station and request to exchange it for a
"crossover Democratic" ballot that lists the candidates.
However, if the voter fails to ask for the "crossover" ballot by its
specific name, the poll worker is barred from suggesting it and they won't
receive it.
Jen Abreu, a poll worker, told me about the disaster this created in 2016:
"If this NPP voter did not specifically ask for a Democratic crossover
ballot, they were given an official NPP ballot, which did not list
presidential candidates."
There's another, new way NPP voters may obtain a presidential ballot:
re-register from NPP to Democrat right at the polling station on election
day and thereby get a presidential ballot.
However, this same day registration option is little known, not advertised
by the state - and I found not a single sign at the four voting centers I
visited that mentioned the new option.
What's the impact of this labyrinthine ballot dance? A lot, according to the
statistician Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc, a private
firm employed by both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Mitchell recently completed a poll of 700 independent voters and found that
while 61% wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, nearly half (45%) were
clueless about how to get a Democratic ballot. Another third of NPP voters
believed that they could not exchange their no-candidate ballots - though
the law says they may.
This year, hundreds of thousands of these voters had already mailed back the
NPP ballot without presidential candidates because, according to Mitchell's
polling, they assumed they had no ability to exchange it.
Mitchell's pollsters also asked 300 NPP voters whom they'd vote for if they
had obtained the correct ballot. About 26% preferred Sanders, which
translates to 553,000 potential lost votes, by Mitchell's estimates. Mike
Bloomberg, meanwhile, could come up 383,000 votes short.
The Democratic National Committee chiefs, who created and uphold the rules,
show little sympathy for the millions of non-Democrats who want to exercise
their right to vote in their primary but refuse to register as Democrats.
And that could be because they will continue to back only establishment
candidates. Notably, Joe Biden is endorsed by the California official who
directs this tragi-comic voting process, the secretary of state, Alex
Padilla.
By contrast, in Colorado, another vote-by-mail state, the secretary of state
simply ignores the DNC, sending every independent voter both a Republican
and a Democratic party primary ballot - providing an easy way to vote as
they choose.
Will California's voters choose the Democratic candidate. or will the DNC
obstacle course bend the outcome?
