It’s been going around among some Sanders supporters: Hillary Clinton is stealing votes and the primary election.
The first time I heard it was when someone called in to Vox Pop, an afternoon call-in show for the New York public radio powerhouse WAMC. The caller, a lady of at least middle age, called asserting the claim that the the Clinton campaign was stealing votes and causing voting problems. When asked for an example, the only thing she could come up with was Bill Clinton appearing at the polls in a couple of Massachusetts communities.
Two days later, I came across the conspiracy theory again, this time in The Nation, where Joshua Holland writes about it:
At Reader Supported News, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, co-authors of How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, write that we’ve “already seen deeply disturbing signs” of election fraud, “to the detriment of the Bernie Sanders campaign.” Those deeply disturbing signs included early, erroneous reports that Clinton had won all six coin-flips in Iowa, and some disparity between the notoriously unreliable exit polls—which in most cases don’t capture absentee or early votes—and the final results in Massachusetts, Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio. (In an e-mail exchange, Wasserman assured me that German exit polls are very reliable, and asked why ours would be any different.)
There’s currently a WhiteHouse.gov petition demanding an investigation into “Clinton surrogate voting fraud in Wyoming,” a state Sanders won by a margin of 156 to 124 state delegates, according to Real Clear Politics. The Clinton campaign has also been accused of “stealing” Iowa, Nevada, and Arizona.
Conspiracy theories tend toward the right of the political spectrum, but not always. They can be pernicious, destroying reasoned conversation and offering a perverse reason for inaction. They always sell the idea that there are forces beyond our control that really make things happen. They are “’notoriously resistant to falsification,’ and that has ‘new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of disconfirming evidence.’”
Some aspects of Bernie Sanders campaign could be said to encourage conspiracy theories. As Robin Alperstein writes at Medium,
Sanders insinuates Clinton’s positions on Wall Street reform and other issues are driven by campaign contributions. He hasn’t pointed to and can’t point to any instance in which Clinton’s vote or action anywhere has been a result of a campaign contribution. Her campaign platform, moreover, includes all kinds of regulation on many of the industries that Sanders insinuates she won’t take on. There is literally no proof or evidence that she has ever voted based on a contribution or that she will do so — it is pure insinuation.
Guilt by association is a major rhetorical thrust of the Sanders campaign and his supporters, and although political communication often trafficks in fallacies, Sanders is laying the groundwork for conspiracy theories with the suggestions that “Hillary and other Democrats’ positions on Wall Street form, universal health care, and climate change are based on ties to those industries.” There’s no evidence of this, and evidence to the contrary, but it’s politically dangerous.
There are a lot of problems with the New York primary, not to mention the Arizona primary, and some of the state caucuses, but the early requirement for party switching, as Central Mass Dad has noted, goes back over 100 years. This requirement came as a surprise to the many unenrolled voters seeking to vote in New York’s Democratic Primary. They were required to switch six months ago. But history, not Clinton, is to blame. Nick Confessore writes:
Some Sanders supporters have suggested such rules are a way for party leaders to hamstring insurgents like the Vermont senator. But according to Douglas A. Kellner, an election lawyer who is a Democratic commissioner on the New York Board of Elections, the rules were originally intended as a strike against the manipulations of party bosses and political machines.
More than a century ago, party bosses not only picked the candidates, they would pick their voters, too, stripping uncooperative voters of their party registration at a whim to protect their own power, or on suspicion that the voter might not agree with the bosses. At the time, party members picked party leaders, who in turn picked candidates for the general election.
There are other problems to explain in New York. The Gothamist reports that more than 200 New Yorkers have signed on to a lawsuit over being purged from voter rolls or switched to different parties. Both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns are suing Arizona over voting problems there. Still the conspiracy theories persist. There are four to explain the results in Iowa.
As Hollande explains,
There’s just no reason for the Clinton campaign to play games.
And once the internal logic of the [conspiracy] theory falls apart, we’re left with Occam’s Razor: a handful of glitches and irregularities in an electoral system that produces them in abundance year after year. We have 50 voting systems, each with their own arcane rules. We have caucuses and primaries administered by volunteers, some of whom do dumb things. There are voter-ID laws that are designed to disenfranchise eligible voters, and registration deadlines that make no sense.
It’s an unholy mess, but the snags it inevitably produces aren’t evidence of foul play.
Occam’s Razor cuts through the BS well enough here, but Hanlon’s Razor might be even more appropriate.
I think this particular conspiracy theory is popular because it both purports to support democracy while claiming that democracy did not operate correct in this particular instance. The undertone is that “we would have won fair-and-square, but somebody cheated.” The problem is that, while perhaps soothing to the ones who lost, there is rarely actual evidence for this conspiracy theory.
The theories seem to come in four basic forms:
(1) The first type are claims completely based upon rhetoric and rhetoric alone (e.g. “He stole the election!!” “OK, how?” “Um….”)
(2) The second type are claims that “the system” cheated a candidate. Often, the system’s rules are severely flawed, but the rules were known in advance. Examples may be when one candidates wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College (e.g. 2000), or when a candidate wins overall in the more democratic primaries but loses caucuses and then the nomination (e.g. Clinton in 2008).
(3) The third type is when there are accusations of fraud, but they are bogus claims made to cover up partisan motives (e.g. “voter fraud” used to claim that non-eligible voters stole the election and to justify voter ID laws).
(4) The fourth type is actual fraud, which is very rare, at least in the modern era. “Chicago voting” is the classic example, though this is both fairly far in the past and even then probably grossly exaggerated. The modernization of voting makes this type of outright fraud more difficult (compared to say, the pre-Australian ballot era) , and the media certainly has many incentives to report this type of fraud (as any story would get eyeballs).
My sense is that most of the contemporary claims of fraud, especially on the liberal side, fall into category (2). This includes the stuff mark-bail is talking about in the diary: sometimes outdated and poorly constructed election rules that operate as one might expect — poorly — but neither intend to nor systemically have the effect of favoring one candidate over another. The rules just, to put it bluntly, suck. I would submit that this means that we should consider updating these rules, but that they do not constitute “fraud” — contrary to the conspiracy theorists mark-bail so ably describes in this diary.