Inside Job

by Steven Rosenfeld

  The Reno Gazette Journal’s coverage two days later categorized the problems they has witnessed.21 These included: “strange delegate math,” “long check-in process,” “wrong location,” “people who left were improperly counted,” “people with disabilities not allowed to exercise rights,” “disorganized and unprofessional,” “Clinton voters allowed to break rules,” “Wi-Fi overload,” “text check-in not working,” “cards not counted,” “voters turned away.” These complications, which are not unique to Nevada’s caucuses, refer to various steps in the process. This list deserves closer scrutiny.

  These factors, some due to incompetence and others due to institutional decisions, make participating easier or harder. Some help or hurt specific constituents, such as location. Then there are other ways of deterring voters and eroding turnout, from poor planning that leads to long check-in lines at precincts to overcrowding and inexperienced staffing. Those are all details the state party should anticipate and address. Not doing so in Nevada in 2016, a year where one-third fewer Democrats caucused compared to the 2008 Clinton-Obama race, suggests the party either intended Reno’s voting to be messy or it should not be running caucuses. Many academics drew the latter conclusion.

  The problem with barriers to participation is they stay below the radar until it’s too late. Come Election Day, especially in close races, complaining goes nowhere. After Iowa’s and Nevada’s opening caucuses, Sanders’s campaign wised up. They knew the voting and count weren’t straightforward or precise. On April 2, when the party’s county conventions were held, only two-thirds of the delegates elected in February showed up: 2,964 for Sanders, and 2,386 for Clinton. Sanders ended that day by sending 1,613 delegates to the state convention, while Clinton sent 1,298.22

  That turnaround prompted Sanders’s campaign to tweet that they had staged a comeback. But they hadn’t. By that time, the campaign press wasn’t following steps between the first caucuses and national party convention, except for pages dedicated to delegate counts. Sanders’s surge didn’t make much news. Moreover, his win was among the elected delegates, not the DNC’s superdelegates. His Nevada campaign won a key battle but lost the war.

  I briefly ran into Weaver the night before opening caucuses. The campaign held a rally at an amphitheater in Henderson, east of Las Vegas. I had not seen him in decades. We agreed no one who knew Bernie back then could have imagined that he would be running for president and become a real contender. Weaver hoped the campaign would squeak out a Nevada win and confided that the next stretch of states—South Carolina and southern states on Super Tuesday—would go for Clinton. But after that, he said there would be a month or more where everything should line up behind Bernie.

  That’s what happened. But in key states where primary elections ensued, their campaign ran into other antidemocratic hurdles. Some came from state party policies. Some came from administrative blunders and stonewalling by local election officials. Some were by media coverage and discouraged turnout. All of these hurdles underscore that nobody, especially outsiders like Bernie, can win unless they generate turnout that becomes a wave big enough to breach the barriers. The contest’s next phase illustrated this point again and again.

  4

  NEW QUESTIONS, NEW BARRIERS

  FROM SUPER TUESDAY IN EARLY MARCH until late April’s primary in New York, the pendulum swung from Clinton’s recovery in the South to a Sanders surge in the Midwest and West, where he won seven primaries and caucuses in a row. Clinton’s streak, the first part of that progression, was unsurprising. But her pattern of repeatedly outperforming Election Day media exit polls did not sit well with election integrity activists who saw foul play in the discrepancies between the exit polls and official results.

  Their suspicions kept rising after exit polls forecasting Clinton’s victory were off by more than ten points in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia; and by slightly less in Tennessee, and in Democratic strongholds in Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio. (When the nominating season ended, these data-crunching activists found other odd patterns, such as Sanders winning in smaller precincts where ballots were counted by hand but losing in larger ones where votes were tallied electronically.) To them, this points to hacking or altering counts by tampering with voting machine software.23 Party leaders and election officials routinely ignore these discrepancies and complaints, and officials never let anyone examine their voting systems. Candidates also stay away. Sanders avoided this issue entirely in his campaign book.

  I’m averse for other reasons. I know hacking is possible, respect academics who have shown how it can be done, and suspect it has happened in races where fewer people are watching, such as in local noncandidate bond issues. But I have not seen sufficient proof in my years of covering federal elections. That doesn’t mean it’s not out there somewhere. But all we see are patterns that raise questions that are never sufficiently answered. After a point, I return to more tangible and traceable factors that shape elections and voting. Sanders kept facing these more concrete partisan barriers and administrative oopsies that consistently favored Clinton as the race unfolded.

  His book mentions how mistakes by county election officials—beyond antidemocratic state party rules—also affected thousands of voters. These are in a different class than bungling precinct captains, incompetent state party chairs, and antidemocratic party rules. These are less excusable because these are coming from government officials on public payrolls.

  One of the foremost examples was in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, where Phoenix is located. Its top election official, Helen Purcell, who had held that post for years, made a bad judgment call when she closed 140 out of 200 voting centers for the primary. It is likely she never would have been allowed to do this had the enforcement trigger in the 1965 Voting Rights Act had not been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013.24 The Justice Department had previously questioned having one poll for every 21,000 voters, compared to an average of 2,500 for the rest of the state. What could go wrong?

  Purcell, like many administrators, sought to make voting more efficient. Her mistake was implementing this in a presidential primary and not a lower-turnout race. To say that voters were caught off-guard is an understatement. People didn’t know where to vote. Some stood in line for five-plus hours to get into the voting centers. Local activists, national civil rights law groups, Sanders, Clinton, and the DNC all filed lawsuits. One suit sought to throw out the primary results. Another challenged Purcell’s rationale but also took aim at other anti-voter tactics, such as a 2016 state law making it a felony to collect another person’s ballot and bring it to a poll (making it harder for Native Americans and seniors). Another wanted the county’s elections under court supervision. Nothing changed the results in the jurisdiction where 70 percent of Arizona’s Latinos live.25

  Sanders mentioned this morass in his book, saying he was stunned by how an administrative decision undermined the finish line of a hard-fought campaign. “I thought we had a good shot to win there. We didn’t and I still don’t know why. One thing I do know was that the voting process in Arizona was an absolute disaster and an embarrassment to American democracy,” he wrote. “Nobody can ever really know which candidate was hurt more by this travesty, but I don’t think it helped us. Many of Clinton’s supporters were older and voted by mail. Most of our supporters came out on Election Day with the obvious expectation that they would be allowed to vote in a reasonable period of time.”26

  The Sanders campaign would soon discover that sloppy election administration could be as damaging to his efforts as antidemocratic state party rules. As his April momentum grew, the media’s eyes turned to New York and the Big Apple where many news outlets are based. Its April 19 primary had every angle for maximum drama. A Brooklyn-born socialist returned home to face the state’s former two-term US senator, who also was the former secretary of state and First Lady. Hovering below this hype was a big blue state’s notoriously stubborn Democratic Party and intransigent elec
tion officials.

  The primary run by the New York State Democratic Committee is one of two dozen in the United States that are closed, meaning only registered Democrats can participate.27 Like Nevada, independents or voters who joined another party cannot make a last-minute decision to cast a vote for a Democrat that will count. They might show up and insist on voting, but they will get a provisional ballot after not being listed as a Democrat. Their ballot will not count when counties finalize their tallies. New York’s closed primaries meant three million Independents could not cast a vote for Sanders, even though he was elected as one to Congress for more than a quarter century.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. New York has the nation’s longest party registration deadlines.28 It’s been this way for decades and nobody in power is inclined to change it. To vote in the Democrats’ April 2016 primary, you would have had to register as a party member by October 2015. So even as Bernie held rallies before tens of thousands across New York City, many people who heard and liked him could not vote for him.29 If that wasn’t frustrating enough, another barrier emerged in a key borough targeted by his campaign. As April began, news broke that the Board of Elections (BOE) in Kings County, better known as Brooklyn, had purged—or removed—122,000 voters from the official rolls, and had not told those people they could not vote in the primary.30

  The rough outline of what happened merits explaining. These nuts and bolts are some of what Republicans seize and distort when they make claims about voter fraud, their made-up menace and excuse for passing anti-voter laws in red states. Basically, Brooklyn’s election office failed to keep their voter rolls current, and was slammed in public reports for things that sounded worse than they were—but it still kept messy bookkeeping. Then the county’s Board of Elections (BOE) made matters worse by locally purging voters but not telling the state’s election agency—whose online records said those people could vote in 2016’s primary.

  The problem that kept Brooklyn’s voter rolls from being accurate is one faced by every county in America. After registered voters move, marry and change their names, or die, almost nobody notifies local election offices. Thus, voter rolls, which are not magically updated, are in a state of flux because a county’s demographics are constantly changing. Some states have reliable data systems that track and update these changes, but not New York State and not Brooklyn. Dead people can remain listed, as well as people who move and register elsewhere. The dead don’t vote. Neither do most people who move, although there’s always a handful—usually in single digits—who think they can vote in more than one state. Voter roll errors are an easy target for sensation-seeking media that don’t think through what they are writing. The GOP also targets outdated lists as it looks to overly police the process, usually by creating impediments to blue voting blocs.

  Before the 2016 primary, a New York City government audit report hit Brooklyn hard for its sloppiness in voter-list maintenance. Then Kings County didn’t follow the steps of a 1993 law (the National Voter Registration Act) that laid out how voter purges are to be done.31 That law said that nobody who is a registered voter can be purged unless they have not voted in two federal cycles—four years—and not until after county offices try to contact them about losing their voting rights. That was where the BOE began to screw up, because they found 122,000 people who had not voted since 2008, purged them from rolls starting in 2015, but did not tell the state’s election agency. When New Yorkers went to the state’s website, they saw that they could vote. However, they couldn’t. All this surfaced on April Fools’ Day.

  The result on April 19 was confusion, frustration, and anger as large numbers of people showed up and found they were not listed as voters, or their party affiliation was incorrect—another bureaucratic snafu—and they couldn’t vote in the primary they wanted. As is typical in New York, local officials barely budged. A handful of voters went to court, and, helped by election protection attorneys, won the right to cast a regular ballot. Most did not. New York State’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office received over a thousand complaints.32 The county BOE director, Michael Ryan, declared that, “no one was disenfranchised.” That’s absurd, not after 120,000 Brooklyn voters cast provisional ballots, of which only 31,000 ended up being counted. The rest were deemed ineligible.

  New York was the latest big race that Sanders needed to win to blunt Clinton’s lead. His campaign threw everything they had at it, including most of their media budget. He also flew to the Vatican to see the pope days before the primary. But it did not happen. Even if all of those voided Brooklyn votes had gone for Sanders, he would have fallen short by more than 100,000 votes statewide. Berniecrats correctly pointed out partisan barriers (closed primaries, registration deadline) and administrative snafus (voter roll purges and other errors) were not confined to Kings County. New York being New York, finger pointing ensued. Brooklyn officials were disciplined. Lawsuits ensued—including the Department of Justice intervening in early 2017. But the primary results remained.

  Months later, Sanders wrote, “We worked very hard there and ran an excellent campaign, but there were just too many obstacles in our way.” He forged on and looked to the last big blue state, California, to try to make a case to the DNC superdelegates that he was more electable than Clinton.33 Like every key state before it, California presented yet more obstacles that he didn’t anticipate.

  5

  THE NOT-SO-GOLDEN STATE

  AFTER LOSING NEW YORK, DELAWARE, PENNSYLVANIA, Maryland, and Connecticut—but winning in Rhode Island, Indiana, West Virginia, and Oregon—Sanders’s campaign made a strategic decision. They would shut operations in other states and tell their best organizers to go to California. Its June 7 primary fell on the last day of all state nominating contests. By then, Sanders had won 45 percent of the pledged delegates. He felt that if they won the biggest state, they might sway the superdelegates. National and state polls kept reporting he was doing better than Clinton in theoretical matchups with Trump.

  Sanders then did what no presidential candidate has done in decades. He spent a month in California, holding forty rallies that brought out nearly a quarter-million people.34 Like New York, California had different quirky procedures and party rules regarding who could and could not vote in their primary. California’s confusion began when voters were asked if they wanted to join a party on the state registration form. There are a series of boxes to check. The first was “American Independent Party,” a right-wing party, which is not an independent. Tens of thousands of Californians inadvertently joined the AIP.

  They should have checked the “No Party Preference” (NPP) box. But that wasn’t clear. The Los Angeles Times estimated three-quarters of AIP’s members had zero intention of joining it—half a million people.35 That error set in motion a series of dominoes that fell as voting began, first by mail-in ballots and then at precincts. The California Democratic Party allows NPP voters, genuine independents, to vote in its primary, unlike New York.36 But people who thought they were independents and wanted to vote by mail received the AIP primary ballot. A similar situation unfolded at the polls.37 California’s Democratic Party, led by Gov. Jerry Brown who backed Clinton, did not say anything to clear up this confusion.

  Still, Sanders was upbeat. The crowds at his rallies were big and enthusiastic, and ignored East Coast media calls for him to drop out. He had run out of money for statewide advertising—which costs millions per week in California. Nonetheless, Clinton took him seriously and returned for a final series of rallies and fund-raisers.

  Then one of 2016’s most inglorious moments of media bias struck. One day before the primary, the Associated Press published an article saying its team had reached all of the undeclared superdelegates and found Clinton had secured the nomination.38 To declare the race over less than twenty-four hours before millions of Californians were to vote in the first primary that mattered in their state in decades was the height of arrogance. The AP is not any wire service. It’s a na
tional co-op whose reports become the basis for local TV and radio news, and whose articles fill the pages of regional and local newspapers.

  There is no way to quantify the impact of the AP’s ambush of 2016’s final primaries. It was an unforeseen antidemocratic deed in a season marred by them. Sanders wrote in his book, “I strongly believe that their action had a negative impact on voter turnout and hurt us. Why vote if the election was over? Our younger voters were more likely to cast their votes on Election Day rather than voting earlier by absentee ballot, as many Clinton voters did.”39

  On Primary Day, California also experienced its share of administrative snafus that never seem to disappear in American elections. Poll workers gave out provisional ballots instead of regular ones. Some polls had incomplete voter rolls. Some ran out of paper ballots. That night, the media announced that Clinton had won by fourteen points, more than exit polls had forecast. She also won in New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota, while Sanders won Montana and North Dakota.

  The last primaries ended Sanders’s presidential hopes. Had he won a majority of elected delegates, he planned to file a series of motions as the Democratic National Convention’s opening gavel fell to disqualify superdelegates, and then quickly move to a vote based on pledged delegates. At that point, Sanders would have either won the nomination or walked out, a senior campaign aide told me in spring 2017. This strategy was not reported at the time.

  Within a week of the last primaries, however, Sanders and his senior staff began meeting with Clinton to negotiate what the party would do to honor his issues; in the platform, party rules (reforming the superdelegate system) and with campaigning that fall. Those meetings began before California finished its official vote count. That took time because California uses paper ballots counted by scanners, and millions of mailed-in ballots. Once the count was done, he had 46 percent, cutting her supposed primary night lead in half.40