California Primary: Returning to the Scene of Crime

By Greg Pallast and Dennis Bernstein

Editor: How can California declare Clinton the winner of the primary when 96% of the votes were never received by election officials? I love the one about the guy who had to call the police before the poll workers allowed him to vote.

This week on The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — Election Crimes Bulletin — the Crime Scene: California. The Crime? Two million votes still not counted. One million ballots already disqualified, thrown away. Another million so-called provisional “placebo” ballots. Here’s the story of the voting horror show you won’t get on Fox or MSDNC.

[Transcript: Originally broadcast June 8, 2016]

ennis J Bernstein: This week, we’re going to do a postmortem on yesterday’s California primary. Greg, I know you were out there. You were also trying to vote?

Palast: I think we need to get a long piece of yellow tape that says “crime scene” and wrap it around the state of California. It was ugly. Days before the election, the polls were showing it was a dead heat between Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton, with Sanders rising. How could it be what the AP called “a crushing victory” with so-called 96% of the vote counted? The answer is that 96% of the vote has not been counted.

Specifically, the mail-in ballots, which tend to be the Democratic Party regulars, were counted first – they’re all Hillary folk. She’s leading among registered Democrats by about 30%. But those who got NPP, that means that they’re independent, No Party Preference ballots, that’s just about the second biggest party in California, a no party … 15% of the people who had those mailed them back in, which is quite a process. Of those ballots, maybe 100,000 were mailed yesterday [Tuesday June 6], a couple hundred thousand total this week. Those have not been received, let alone counted yet. They haven’t been received by the registrar yet, so they can’t have been counted. And those are overwhelmingly voters for Sanders (according to the Golden State Poll, he has a 40% lead among those). Again, those votes have not been received by the boards of elections, let alone counted.

Source: California Primary: Returning to the Scene of Crime