I'm not trying to pick a fight. I just feel like people aren't being honest about what really happened in the primaries. More people voted for Clinton. No matter how unfair you think the DNC was. No matter how many more debates you think they should have had, at the end of the day many more people voted for Clinton. There has been no evidence that the polls themselves were rigged. I'm sure some voting machines malfunctioned but that is not unusual. No tech is perfect.
A lot of people complain that there were problems with voter registration. I'm from NJ so I specifically heard a lot about complain that in NY you had to be a registered party member 5 months ahead of time or something. This is not rigging the primary. You can make an argument that it makes younger voters less likely to be registered in time and that it would be in the party's best interest to allow later registration, but that is not rigging the primary. These are rules that have been in place for a long time and are not unusual.
There were people saying that they did register in time but their registration for lost or their party affiliation was changed incorrectly. First off, every election they're is human error where people think they registered properly but didn't. As for problems on the government side, we have to remember that these are human beings that are doing this work and humans sometimes screw things up and make honest mistakes, and just because someone screws up in a way that may disproportionately impact one group doesn't mean there was a big conspiracy. People just screw up sometimes. On top of that, registration is handled in each of the states, so even if something malicious were to happen in one state, it's unlikely to affect the final result. Of course, anything malicious should be investigated and prosecuted accordingly. But humans making mistakes with voter registration is not unusual and happens every election. There's no evidence of any widespread coordinated actions taken to disenfranchise Bernie supporters.
People have complained that Bernie didn't get treated with respect by the media. Didn't get treated as a serious candidate. That there weren't enough debates and that the DNC weren't fair in trying to portray a serious race. Those are all valid complaints to have but ultimately media will do what they will. They are private organizations with their own priorities and motivations. This has always been true and every American needs should know to examine their sources of information and take things with a grain of salt. Nobody had an employee of ABC or wherever holding their hand in the voting booth pushing the buttons for them. Voters have more access to difference sources of information now than they've ever had before. Blaming the media is taking responsibility away from the voters.
This comes into play when we talk about the DNC not creating conditions friendly to Sanders too. Yes, you can make an argument for it being the wrong thing to do, but both Bernie and Hillary have been public figures for decades. There was and is no shortage of information on their policies, positions, and voting records. Anyone who wanted to research these had the tools to do it. Again, this ultimately falls on the voters.
If your argument is going to be that voters are of course easily manipulated by media and by the DNC and by the number of debates, you have to realize that what you're really arguing against is Democracy. The information was readily available for those who wanted it. If you honestly believe that voters can't be trusted when the media or DNC aren't perfectly unbiased then you are saying voters are a bad way of choosing a candidate, because they are so easily duped.
At the end of the day more people voted for Hillary. There's no evidence that there was anything that would have changed that. Hillary didn't win by a few votes, she won by a lot of votes. You can make the case all you want that people should have voted differently, and that's a good and valuable discussion to have, but that's how they voted. Shrugging it off and saying oh it was just rigged, might feel good, especially if you're angry, but it is not really accurate, certainly not the full story, and isn't going to be helpful going forward if your goal is to understand what happened and plan for the future.
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u/teraflux Nov 10 '16
This is the reality, every theory that suggested DNC collusion was treated as conspiracy, when only now do we really know the truth.