Superdelegates Should Respect the Will of the Voters, Switch to Bernie Sanders

Going to the convention no matter what the thus-far certified results of each state's primary election says, the Bernie Sanders campaign now has every reason to contest any attempt to nominate Hillary Clinton. It has to do with the mantra of the Sanders campaign, when he called upon the "superdelegates," as they are called, to respect the popular vote.

At that time most of the superdelegates were, and still are, aligned with Hillary. But the level of shenanigans by Clinton's people in the election machineries has assured that her nomination will cause a massive and public revolt within the party.

If there is anything crystal clear about this Democratic primary season, it is that the popular vote has been suppressed, cheated, manipulated, and altered in ways which have sparked half of dozen lawsuits months before the convention, and has triggered as many official investigations by the US Department of Justice, and state and local authorities.

Mathematically impossible errors in exit polls, and the blatantly unscientific practice of simply changing the exit poll numbers to match the official vote at the end of each primary, suggests, to a degree of probability which cannot be ignored, that the nomination has been stolen from Bernie Sanders. 50,000-person rallies verses a few thousand at best for Hillary did not lie.

Were it not for voter suppression tactics now condemned even by NYC officials who are Clinton supporters, like NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, there might have been no "big win" in NY for the media to trumpet as the final stretch for Hillary.

All those people at rallies don't necessarily vote? Well, not if you drop them from the voter rolls, so that they need to get a court order to vote and have an entire day to do it.

In Chicago, a citizens' election watchdog group caught election officials committing criminal election fraud before their very eyes. Who's Counting, whose members include a medical doctor, an attorney, and a long-time political activist, testified at a Chicago Board of Elections hearing that they saw officials at an audit intentionally remove 21 votes from Bernie Sanders and add 49 votes to Hillary Clinton.

This is just one randomly selected machine in a randomly selected precinct, with citizens watching. What would we find in further audits across the state of Illinois, which was considered a crucial contest, in which Clinton barely eked out a 50.5% - 48.7% victory? What is taking place when citizen watchdog groups are not present? For that matter, what does this say about what may have happened in the contests across the nation where exit polls inexplicably had Sanders doing better than the official count every time, as mathematician Richard Charnin points out?

A notorious Colombian hacker doing 10 years for hacking elections across Latin America recently told Bloomberg News that the American election is being hacked "one hundred percent."

Yes, exit polls can be wrong, and often are. But never by so much in the same direction, in 20 out of 22 primary elections. To put this in perspective, this is roughly analogous to a coin coming up heads in 20 out of 22 tosses.

The US has called foul over far lesser discrepancies in exit polls in other countries, as Richard Hatlem of Counterpunch notes.. Hatlem writes:

"When exit polling and final results are substantially off in places where the U.S. doesn’t like the party that wins, U.S. officials and their media partners cry foul. This has been true in recent decades not just in Ukraine, but also in Belarus, Serbia, and Venezuela. Statistically improbable exit polling differences matter everywhere else, it seems, but not here."

The Democratic Convention will become a megatheater for the replay of open, egregious violations of the voting rights of citizens across the country, reminding all Americans of just how imperiled our democracy has become. It is likely to produce a clarion call for the prosecution and clean sweep of the election officials who allowed it, or were behind it.

Who let the unregistered Hillary supporters into the caucus in the important "First in the West" Nevada contest? Thanks to smartphones and Youtube, the evidence is easily available for all the world to see.

Why haven't criminal charges been filed against Chicago election officials despite plain-as-day evidence that they engaged in federal crimes?

If the superdelegates who have pledged to uphold the popular will are serious about their promise, then their course is clear: they must switch to Bernie Sanders, to defend the integrity of the process itself. Otherwise they will be forever tarnished by the unprecedented corruption of this primary season, worse even than the US Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush as president in 2000, by handing him Florida, which after all was still just one state.

And if Hillary loses the general election to Trump, as the much weaker candidate against him compared to Bernie Sanders, according to polls, voters will spend the next four years reminding the "superdelegates" that they brought this on.