Sanders Campaign Must Not Accept NY Primary Results Until All Votes Counted, Audit Complete. Media Must Cease and Desist
With polls barely officially closed for an hour, and people in line still waiting to vote, it is clear the media is intent on calling Clinton the winner. But with botched voter registrations of a magnitude that the NY City Comptroller has stepped in with strong language and an announcement that he will "undertake an audit of the operations and management of the Board of Elections," it is impossible to know who actually won. Comptroller Scott Stringer said in a scathing press release:
“There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site,” Comptroller Stringer said. “The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections..."
The Comptroller says that the New York City Board of Elections "confirms" that "more than 125,000 voters in Brooklyn were removed from voter rolls." No figure is given for how many were removed in New York's other massive Boroughs, nor how many voters had their registrations listed incorrectly. New York has five Boroughs, so an extrapolation of this number to the rest of the city would amount to well over a half-million voters. These are massive numbers, able to swing whether Sanders or Clinton was the actual majority victor.
Moreover, with no reason for confidence in the New York City Board of Elections, mandatory auditing of 3% of all voting machines has not begun, which is a requirement of the New York state election law Section 9-211 (see: "How New Yorkers Can Audit Voting Station Results in the NY Primary".) Finally, we do not know how many "affidavit ballots" were given, ballots given to those whose registration was listed incorrectly, and whether they have been counted.
In short, it is far too soon for the media to be declaring who won New York. The Sanders campaign should point out these discrepancies and file for a court injunction, under the Equal Time laws and doctrine, for the major television news networks Fox, NBC, et al to cease and desist, until the Sanders campaign is at such time availed of the opportunity to respond.
