Lessons of 2016: How Rigging Their Primaries Against Progressives Cost Democrats the Presidency
“I was pissed.” That was how Ben W., a 38-year-old Jewish Democrat of Surprise, Arizona, felt after trying to vote for Bernie Sanders in his state’s primary last March. “Of the eight people around me, seven of us were forced to take provisional ballots.”
Because Arizona is a closed-primary state, a person can participate in a party’s primary only if they listed that party on their voter registration. Nobody, except the voter, is allowed to change their party affiliation. However, that’s exactly what appears to have happened to countless voters in closed primary states across the country. Worse still, people who had previously been registered as independents and those who appeared on donor lists for Bernie Sanders seem to have been specifically targeted. We now know that these illegal purges were conducted by the same state and party officials who were entrusted with carrying out a fair election and that they were acting at the behest of the DNC. In doing so, they clearly failed to anticipate the human toll this would have on the victims of this brazen malfeasance.
Ben arrived at the severely overcrowded polling site at 11 AM on Election Day. After spending a half-hour looking for available street parking, he got in line to vote. It took another 45 minutes of waiting before he made it to the front. Having been a registered Democrat for years, he has voted in every single election, including state and local races, for the last decade. He even checked his voter registration and confirmed he was listed in the database as a Democrat a week before the primary, just to be sure. So you can imagine his shock and frustration, then, when he finally made it to the front of the line, only to be told by poll workers that he wouldn’t be allowed to vote because he had, according to them, changed his party affiliation at the last minute. When he protested that he did no such thing, they indicated that it must be a random database error and that he would have to use a provisional ballot, which he ultimately did. Many of the people around him, all Sanders supporters, were having the exact same problem. There were no reports of this happening to any Hillary Clinton supporters.
In New York, registered Democrat Shelly Berry was also unable to vote after discovering that her party affiliation had been changed, as well. Upon investigating, she found that someone had actually filled-out a form in her name and forged her signature, requesting her party affiliation be changed from Democrat to unaffiliated. Berry obtained a copy of this form and posted it on a Facebook group titled, “NY Voters whose registration was changed without their knowledge.” She included an older form that she had filled out, showing that the signature on the new form doesn’t even come close to matching hers. I’ve been writing software for over 20 years and I’ve never heard of a database error that could cause that. To any rational observer, this clearly demonstrates malicious intent.
If you want to understand why independents and progressives are so angry in 2016, look no further than the front of a long line to vote in the primaries, where scores of people like Ben and Shelly were being turned away because the “Democratic” Party establishment decided that these voters were not true Democrats and thus don’t deserve the privilege of voting. This is the same party whose leaders love to brag about being an “open tent” where people of all stripes are welcomed. Under the leadership of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and her allies, that tent has become a citadel locked down tighter than Fort Knox.
In the wake of the primaries, Election Justice USA released a sobering report detailing how the election was stolen. Among other things, the report found widespread instances of election fraud, including registration manipulation, illegal voter purges, and evidence of voting machine tampering. In the ensuing lawsuit against them, rather than deny the allegations, the DNC instead filed a brief claiming that they had every right to rig their primaries because their stated commitment to hold a fair election that conformed to their own rules was a “political promise” and thus not legally binding. Yes, really. Despite this tacit admission of guilt, their staunchest defenders still insist that everything was fair and that progressives should just “get over it.” Insulting people’s intelligence like this is generally not an effective way to earn their votes.
Rather than apologize and try to make amends, the DNC adopted a general election strategy reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney campaign of 2004, demanding that progressives vote for them, anyway, or else the bigoted orange bagpipe will destroy the world. Even President Obama joined the chorus, proclaiming that anyone who doesn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is insulting him. The establishment gambled that fear and gaslighting would make us forget what they did. They were mistaken. General election turnout for Democrats in 2016 plummeted, despite near-record turnout during the primaries. When asked whom he voted for in November, Ben’s answer said it all: “Not Clinton or Trump.”
The resounding message from progressives this election cycle is clear: Our voting rights are non-negotiable, period. No amount of bullying, fear mongering, or guilt-tripping is going to change that. We are determined to protect those rights, even if it means we have to endure a Trump presidency. Perhaps the DNC and their allies will remember that the next time they’re thinking about altering people’s voter registrations without their consent.
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My name is Kris Craig. I’m a 35-year-old software engineer from Seattle. I write about current events from a progressive perspective. You can find a full list of my nationally-syndicated op-eds at: http://birdie.freeddns.org/opEdStats
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