Greg Palast | Will California Steal 553,000 Votes From Bernie Sanders?

03 March 20

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Greg Palast | Will California Steal 553,000 Votes From Bernie Sanders?

Greg Palast, Guardian UK
Palast writes: "The state's arcane and complex voting system could steal hundreds of thousands of votes from Bernie Sanders."

The state’s arcane and complex voting system could steal hundreds of thousands of votes from Bernie Sanders.

n February, California mailed 3.7m 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 party 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.

Even if Sanders, as expected, wins the plurality of California’s votes, he could well be shorted out of hundreds of thousands of votes and scores of delegates.

The other candidate at risk in California’s odd, troubled balloting: Mike Bloomberg.

How did this happen? While Californians, including independent voters, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in general elections, 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 has 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 have already mailed back the NPP ballot without presidential candidates because, according to Mitchell’s polling, they assumed they had no ability to exchange it.

This past week, 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?

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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders waves at his supporters during his Get Out the Vote rally at St. Paul River Centre Monday. (photo: Christine T. Nguyen/MPR News)

After Mayhem Monday, It's Super Tuesday!
Jim Newell, Slate
Newell writes: "There won't be enough time for forecasters to capture the full extent of the past three days' events in their models. That leads us to a very strange position heading into the most consequential day of the Democratic primary thus far: We'll have to just watch results come in and see what happens, like it's the 1950s or something. The horror!"
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President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence listen to US Secretary of Health Alex Azar during a news conference on the Covid-19 outbreak, at the White House on February 26, 2020. (photo: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images)

Pence and Azar’s Coronavirus Media Tour Revealed That Their Main Concern Is Protecting Trump
Aaron Rupar, Vox
Rupar writes: "There’s really no defending the attempts President Donald Trump and his eldest son made over the weekend to weaponize a pandemic outbreak against their political opponents, including the president dismissing Democratic concerns about the administration’s coronavirus response as 'their new hoax.'"

It was an exercise in spin.

here’s really no defending the attempts President Donald Trump and his eldest son made over the weekend to weaponize a pandemic outbreak against their political opponents, including the president dismissing Democratic concerns about the administration’s coronavirus response as “their new hoax.” Nonetheless, on Sunday, both Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar gave it their best shot.

Three-plus years into the Trump presidency, there’s a long tradition of administration officials defending everything from Trump’s absurd misinformation about how wind energy works to his juvenile attacks on political opponents. But that Pence and Azar — the top administration officials overseeing the coronavirus response — wouldn’t even disavow Trump’s use of the word “hoax” amid a possible pandemic is perhaps the strongest illustration yet that there’s nothing Trump’s top officials won’t defend.

During an appearance on CNN, Pence downplayed Donald Trump Jr.’s baseless accusation about Democrats hoping that Covid-19 (the disease caused by coronavirus) “kills millions of people,” characterizing his sentiment as “understandable.”

And on ABC, Azar defended President Trump’s comments about concerns about his administration’s handling of the outbreak being a “new hoax,” saying, “he’s talking about the partisan sniping that we’re seeing, and that’s just — it’s unnecessary.”

It should have been easy for Pence and Azar to distance themselves from those remarks. It is simply not the case that Democrats want people to die, and with five American deaths already reported, it’s clear that nothing about the coronavirus is a “hoax.” But the fact that Pence and Azar instead defended the remarks shows the degree of loyalty Trump expects from those working for him.

In that regard, Pence’s and Azar’s performances Sunday demonstrated why Trump refused to appoint someone from outside the administration to oversee the coronavirus response effort. He ultimately selected Pence, a choice that, according to a Washington Post report Saturday, was made as Trump was “wondering whether such a person would be loyal to him.” Hours later, Pence and Azar proved that they are.

There are already many legitimate reasons to criticize the administration’s coronavirus response

It is true that there has been some criticism of the administration’s response to the coronavirus, but it has been bipartisan and largely grounded in specific issues, such as GOP Sen. Richard Shelby and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s concerns about the amount of anti-coronavirus money the administration has allocated being inadequate. And as my colleague Matthew Yglesias detailed last week, there are good reasons for folks to be worried about whether the administration is up for the task.

Trump has systematically dismantled America’s pandemic response capabilities since taking office, including getting rid of the National Security Council’s Director of Global Health Security position in 2018 and proposing massive cuts to both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health as recently as last month. So it’s not surprising that the administration’s response to the coronavirus has been dysfunctional at best.

On Sunday, Axios broke news about problems with government-made test kits for the coronavirus that have resulted in the US being far behind nations like China and South Korea when it comes to conducting large-scale testing. Those problems make the Trump administration’s refusal to take the World Health Organization (WHO) up on its offer to provide testing kits look extremely questionable.

Axios reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now says it has full confidence in the testing kids, but the delay in rolling them out has already had consequences, as “a slew of new cases announced over the weekend suggest the virus has spread throughout the country while the US government tested only a narrow subset of the population for it.”

As Dr. Matt McCarthy alluded to during a Monday morning appearance on CNBC, the Trump administration responded to the coronavirus threat by closing borders but was derelict about testing people within the country.

“In New York state, the person who tested positive was only the 32nd test we’ve done in this state. That is a national scandal,” McCarthy said. “They’re testing 10,000 a day in some countries, and we can’t get this off the ground. I’m a practitioner on the firing line, and I don’t have the tools to properly care for patients today.”

The CDC came under fresh scrutiny Monday following news it mistakenly released a patient from the Texas Center for Infectious Disease who later tested positive for Covid-19. And That may not be the only major mistake that’s already taken place: A whistleblower claims Health and Human Services (HHS) staffers received coronavirus patients from Wuhan without protective gear or training.

Trump’s choice to put Pence in charge of the coronavirus response has also drawn criticism. The vice president not only has no public health qualifications, but he turned a blind eye to an HIV outbreak in his home state of Indiana while he was governor. As Judd Legum reported, Pence wasted no time misleading people about the administration’s coronavirus response. During a Sunday morning appearance on Fox Business, Pence obfuscated the lack of Covid-19 testing that’s occurred in the US by conflating medical testing with the casual screening of people traveling through airports.

All of this is to say that pointing out legitimate concerns about the Trump administration’s response is not tantamount to politicizing a viral outbreak, despite the administration’s claims otherwise. And it is worth noting the administration has not been clear about the source of their outrage — for example, when Pence was asked on Meet the Press to cite examples of rhetoric that he thought crossed a line, he struggled to do so.

Trump doesn’t view coronavirus concerns solely as a public health issue

Trump, as always, is hypersensitive to criticism, and he seems to view the coronavirus as mainly a public relations issue.

There’s a particular irony in Trump officials attacking Democrats for allegedly politicizing a public health crisis, seeing as how Trump himself was arguably the worst offender in whipping up Ebola hysteria and using it as a cudgel to attack Democrats in the lead-up to the 2014 midterms.

Unlike Trump, Obama responded to that crisis by appointing a czar from outside government to coordinate the response effort. Ultimately, Ebola did not spread in the United States. There were only two deaths from the disease in the country, and both of them were people who contracted it in Africa. It’s hard to argue that the Obama administration’s response was anything but competent and effective.

Trump’s coronavirus response efforts, by contrast, have not gotten off to a great start. And instead of processing criticism constructively and using it to improve, Pence and Azar’s defense of the Trump family’s incendiary comments indicate that anybody who dares to point out problems will become a target for criticism themselves.

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The MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews has been a fixture of cable-TV news for a quarter-century. (photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

MSNBC Host Chris Matthews Resigns After Accusations of Sexism and Harassment
Maxwell Tani and Justin Baragona, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "Longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced on air Monday night that he was resigning following a slew of on-air fumbles and allegations that he made sexually inappropriate remarks to a political columnist in 2016."

EXCERPT:

The Hardball host again drew outrage last week after repeatedly pressing Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a post-debate interview about why she believes a woman over former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s denial of accusations that he made inappropriate remarks about female colleagues at his financial information company. Critics slammed Matthews for casting doubt on Bloomberg’s accuser, prompting women’s advocacy group UltraViolet to call for his ouster. 

“This is good news. This is what needed to happen,” UltraViolet executive director Shaunna Thomas said in a statement after Matthews retired on air. “While tonight is a win, there is still much work to be done to hold Comcast and NBCUniversal accountable and ensure that women and people of color receive fair treatment in the workplace, especially from those in the news media. The fight is far from over, but we’ll celebrate tonight’s victory.”

Over the course of Matthews’ decades-long career at the network, he has made degrading comments about the women at MSNBC and guests who have appeared on his show.

He once joked about using a “Bill Cosby pill” on Hillary Clinton before a 2016 interview and has made cracks about the physical appearances of then-CNBC stars Erin Burnett and Margaret Brennan, and political figures including Sarah Palin and Melania Trump. 

He was also formally reprimanded in the late ’90s for inappropriate comments and jokes he made about a woman in front of CNBC staff. That woman was reportedly given a separation payout from the network.

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Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who is running for the Senate. ‘AOC’s endorsement matters greatly to the diverse electorate and young voters across Texas. I’m proud to have her backing.’ (photo: Diana Ascarrunz)

Leftwing Texan Inspired by Ocasio-Cortez in Bid to Upset Top Republican
Erum Salam, Guardian UK
Salam writes: "Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez has her eyes on a bigger prize. She is running for a chance to represent the party in a vital Texas Senate seat, and to try and defeat Republican incumbent John Cornyn in what would be a remarkable victory."
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Debate moderators CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and CNN anchor Erin Burnett look on before the Democratic Presidential Debate at Otterbein University on October 15, 2019 in Westerville, Ohio. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

There Have Been 21 Debate Questions About Paying for Social Programs, Zero About Paying for War
Sarah Lazare, In These Times
Lazare writes: "Debate moderators have tremendous power to shape political discourse."
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'Birth before 37 weeks of gestation is a leading cause of infant death and illness.' (photo: Roderick Chen/Getty Images)

Heat Waves May Lead to Birth Defects, Low Birth Weight Babies
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "We have long known that children and the elderly need to be checked on during prolonged and intense heat waves. Now, new research has found another group at acute risk from extreme heat: pregnant women."

e have long known that children and the elderly need to be checked on during prolonged and intense heat waves. Now, new research has found another group at acute risk from extreme heat: pregnant women.

Researchers from the University of California in San Diego found that longer and hotter heat waves, exactly the type that is commensurate with the climate crisis, might increase preterm births. As temperatures climbed higher and stayed that way for more and more days, the risk of preterm birth increased, according to the new study that was published in the journal Environment International, as The New York Times reported.

"We looked at acute exposure to extreme heat during the week before birth, to see if it triggered an earlier delivery," said first author Sindana Ilango, a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in public health at UC San Diego and San Diego State University, in a statement. "We found a consistent pattern: exposure to extreme heat does increase risk. And, importantly, we found that this was true for several definitions of 'heatwave.'"

The senior author on the paper Tarik Benmarhnia, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, added that this was the first study to look what particular factors of a heatwave increased the risk of preterm birth. "[N]o one had tried to figure out exactly what kinds of conditions could trigger preterm births," he said in the statement. "Is it the temperature? Is it the combination of the temperature and the humidity? Is it the duration of the heatwave? It's important to ask these questions to know when we need to intervene and inform pregnant people to stay inside and stay cool."

Birth before 37 weeks of gestation is a leading cause of infant death and illness. The World Health Organization has also said that preterm birth rates are increasing around the world. To examine how heat contributes, the researchers looked at California birth records from 2005 to 2013, comparing gestation length to heat records from 2005 to 2013, as The New York Times reported.

The scientists found a striking pattern — the rate of preterm deaths tracked right alongside increases in temperature or length of a heat wave. The New York Times provided an example: at an average a temperature of 88 degrees for two days 6.63 percent of births were preterm. However, at four days of 98-degree temperature, the rate was 7.46 percent.

"We were also surprised to note that the duration of the heatwave seems to be more important than the temperature threshold," said Benmarhnia in a statement. "We thought that temperature would matter the most, but it turns out that it has more to do with how long you're stuck with the high temperatures rather than how hot it is outside."

Similar research is looking at how extreme heat is affecting pregnant women, gestation-length and birth-weight in The Gambia, Africa, as Reuters reported. The African tropics are warming up faster than most of the world. Just recently, the mercury passed 108 degrees Fahrenheit during the cold season.

In The Gambia, many pregnant women have to work the fields to help support their family farms. When people are exposed to heat, more blood flows to the skin to allow heat to escape. This means decreased blood flow to the heart and internal organs, including potentially the placenta, said health researcher Ana Bonell, who is leading the study in The Gambia, as Reuters reported.

"I'm definitely seeing changes in the umbilical artery in about 30 percent of women," she said, although she has not analyzed the data yet, to Reuters.

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