Thursday, May 26, 2016

With every rigged election comes a conservative victory

While reviewing the social media the other day, someone made an interesting claim to the effect that "Hillary Clinton isn't hosting any voter registration drives in California", probably on the assumption that new voters tend to side with Bernie Sanders in primary elections. I did some searching on that and could find no stories to suggest that she was.

But, according to the Breitbart Report, Univision, the Hispanic television network, was acting as a "thinly disguised SuperPAC" for Hillary Clinton when they launched a voter registration drive in February, their report is based on another report from the Washington Post. So far, it just looks like organizations that have supported Hillary Clinton are running voter registration drives if at all. With Univision involved, and one of their biggest markets in California, I'd say they've been pretty busy in that state.

In many of the primary elections to date, we've seen an increase in voter registration, and in California, the increase is unprecedented with better than 500,000 new registrants, mostly Democratic. No one is saying that they know what this means, but there is a good chance that we'll see an uptick in the voter turnout come June 7th. There is also a good chance that Debbie Wasserman Schultz will find a way to throw another wrench into the works for Bernie Sanders.

Already, a lawsuit has been filed by Sanders supporters with a request to keep voter registration open until election day. Sanders supporters know that he will do better when turnout is high and they're betting big on California to turn the nomination contest around. The reason for the lawsuit is that in numerous states, hundreds of thousands of voters were removed from the polls just in time for the election - all without prior notice. Many people have also reported that their party preference has been changed without notice to preclude them from voting in the primaries. There are now ongoing investigations in Arizona and New York because their elections were not above suspicion. New York presents an interesting case because it looks like the woman who purged 126,000 voters from the rolls appears to have taken a bribe to do it.

Mathematician Richard Charmin has been working the numbers on election fraud. He uses a simple concept: review unadjusted exit polls and compare them to election results. He has written this article to examine election fraud from 1988 to 2008 and the pattern is clear. Election results have been consistently rigged against Democrats in favor of Republicans. Note that we use exit polls (now a rigorous, scientific endeavor) to ensure fair elections in developing countries. But for the remaining primary contests, we might not see any exit polls. I guess the game is up.

This is in addition to gerrymandered districts that the courts have been slowly reigning in. Just ask Texas and North Carolina.

The long term effect of all of this election rigging is a consistently more conservative Congress over time. Note that the majority of statehouses and governors offices are now run by Republicans and even conservative Democrats (we'd call them centrist now, but by 1970s standards, they'd be conservative). The effect overall is to drag the entire nation to the right, so far to the right that even Hillary Clinton, a conservative Democrat by any measure - c'mon, she loves Henry Kissinger! - is portrayed as a progressive.

This long and continual drag to the right has been the clarion call and the bane of the Sanders campaign. Conservatives have backed laws that allowed for enormous voter purges. Conservative voter ID laws have allowed the disenfranchisement of millions of voters. They have drawn gerrymandered districts. The same rules that have helped conservatives have also helped Clinton in the primaries, but they won't save her in November.

The conservative drag on the country has given us two presidential candidates that only Wall Street could love - everyone else no so much. That same drag on the country gives voice to conservatives where they might not have a voice. That's because they're in the minority. We know this because in the debate on inequality, they are seriously overwhelmed by the opposition. It's just that the opposition - that's the rest of us - don't know how bad it really is. But with widespread disfranchisement of the liberal electorate through closed primaries, voter purges, gerrymandered districts, and hacked voting machines, America has been remade into a more conservative nation than it really is.

Without a subtle, consistent, hardly ever reported pattern of voter suppression and election fraud, there is no way that we'd see Republican majorities in so many statehouses and in Congress. Not only do we get more conservative Republicans - the moderate Republican became extinct around 2003 - we get more conservative Democrats. You know, like the Goldwater Girl, Hillary Clinton.

We need safe, convenient and secure elections that are fair and that are verified by exit polls just like in developing countries. We need a voter registration system that cannot be tampered with by running a single query to a database that can also change a large number of records at once. We need blockchain record keeping for our votes and our registration. We need to make all of our primaries open so that the independent voters, now 43% of the electorate, who doesn't feel that any major party represents him or her, can have a voice in the nomination process.

Bernie Sanders represents that independent voter. He represents that liberal Democrat that was purged from the voter rolls in New York. He represents the voter working 2 or 3 jobs and can't afford to wait 4 or 5 hours just to vote. He represents all of the people who will not vote for Trump or Hillary. We all want to be heard. This is what the revolution unfolding before us is all about.

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