Jill Stein Invites Bernie Sanders to Take Top of Green Party Presidential Ticket

In an intriguing development which received more major media coverage in UK than in the US, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has personally invited Bernie Sanders to take the top of the Green party ticket for president. The UK Guardian - US Edition reported yesterday that Stein told the newspaper:

“I’ve invited Bernie to sit down explore collaboration – everything is on the table...If he saw that you can’t have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party, he’d be welcomed to the Green party. He could lead the ticket and build a political movement,”

Stein offered to step aside and take the VP slot with Sanders heading the ticket. Although the idea has been the subject of speculation, in the interview Stein made the offer in the bluntest terms yet.

The Green Party is already on the ballot in all major states, and more than enough to win the electoral college, which determines who will be president. The party would likely be on the ballot in many more states between now and November, as a result of petition drives by Sanders supporters.

Rampant evidence of election fraud in the Democratic primaries has driven many Sanders supporters even further from any possibility of voting for Clinton in the general election. Most recently, election integrity activists discovered white-out being used to cover Sanders votes on ballots. In the illinois primary, election monitors have testified to the Chicago Board of Elections that they witnessed correct, hand-counted vote totals being erased, and being replaced by numbers more favorable to Hillary Clinton.

Last month two researchers working out of Stanford University concluded that:

"data suggest that election fraud is occurring in the 2016 Democratic Party Presidential Primary election. This fraud has overwhelmingly benefited Secretary Clinton at the expense of Senator Sanders." ‪

2016 has seen the US come to a political juncture in which voters are faced with two unprecedentedly unpopular candidates, even by the standards of US elections. This opens a path which could free a third party candidate from the traditional "spoiler" label. Sanders easily beats Trump by far more than Clinton does in a multitude of national polls, and, it is argued by supporters, beat Hillary as well but for a wide range of vote-stealing and voter suppression tactics.

As for the protocols of party politics, Sanders can say that any implied or overt agreement to not be a "sore loser" after the primaries are over were conditioned on the party in turn keeping its promise that the contests will be fair and impartial. With a large body of evidence, expert analysis, and official investigations underway seriously questioning the validity of Clinton's pledged delegate count, Sanders has room to maneuver and announce that all previous bets are off.

In a three-way race it is not beyond imagination that Sanders could poll better than either Clinton or Trump. He already beats Trump in every head-to-head match-up, and much of Clinton's support consists of voters saying they will reluctantly cast their lot with Clinton only to "stop Trump."

For his part, Sanders has engaged in tantalizing non-denials that he would ever work with the Green Party. In an interview in June, when a reporter put forth the idea, already broached by Jill Stein, that there was a place for him on the Green party ticket, Sanders said in characteristically skillfully hedged language: "Right now, our goal is to win the Democratic nomination.”

Sanders himself has already denounced what amounts to voter suppression tactics in New York and Arizona, calling them "disgraceful." And in California, when on the night before the primary, long before voting had started in the Golden State, the media repeatedly blared that Clinton had already "clinched" the nomination due to anonymous super-delegate interviews, Sanders declared that he was "disappointed" with the breach of journalistic ethics, which commits news media from swaying voters by prematurely declaring winners. On the day of voting,MSNBC's Lester Holt alone made it a point to remind viewers that the contest was still underway, contrary to reports.

Election experts say that the effect of declaring a winner prematurely is to discourage voters from getting themselves to the polls.

Were Sanders to exercise his option to go Green Party, and upset the electoral college math for both Clinton and Trump, observers note that Clinton's scorched earth policy in the primaries may amount to a Pyrrhic victory, with Clinton winning the nomination battle only to lose the war.