Thousands of Presidential Primary Votes Already Cast Are Not Being Officially Counted

The current primary/caucus system is complicated, prone to error, corruptible and now, it seems, perhaps prone to discounting even those who legitimately cast their votes.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Voting booths in polling place
Voting booths in polling place

Hidden in plain site in this raucous and franticpresidential election contest is the fact that the primaries and caucuses arenot being fully counted, not even days after they close, in many cases, not atall so far. Nevada, which held itscaucus on February 20, and which is being rollickedby its own subsequent vote-resettingcontroversy, still officially counts only 99% of its votes cast. Some states like Minnesota (90%counted), Maine (91% counted), and now, Oregon (96% counted, and holding therefor a day) are even worse. Somestates, like New York, are only missing 1% of the votes cast, but since theyare large states, that represents thousands, if not over ten thousand, votes. New York alone cast 1,817,552 votes, so 1% of that would be about 18,176votes uncounted.

States with less than 100% Democratic Votes counted:

A dozen states with under-counted vote totals leaves 2.67%votes uncounted from these states, after dividing the number of states totaledby the percentage who actually had their votes counted. Some are caucuses so you can't justestimate the missing actual number of votes lost, but still, this list includessome large states with lots of people in them whose votes were not counted anddon't look like they are going to be counted any time soon.

Are these evenly split? Sanders votes? Clinton votes? Obviously,we can't be sure without counting them, but there are some clues that Sandersmight be disproportionately discounted. For example, in the most recent Oregon primary, which is unique in beingmail-in only, the trend lines up until the vote tally stopped being tallied bythe Associated Press, shows Sanders steadily increasing his lead overClinton. When people went to bedon Tuesday night, May 17, the delegate count was Sanders: 28,Clinton: 24. It is now Sanders:34, Clinton: 25, with 4% of the vote still left uncounted.

The two most glaring under-counts are both Sanders states:Minnesota (90% counted) and Maine (91% counted). Maine suffers from a very low vote count split among toomany precincts, some with as little as 1 vote! Were voteless precincts somehow rolled up into a 9%uncounted vote total? But then whynot just say 100% of the vote castwas counted? And Minnesota haslarger vote totals among fewer precincts, so it is hard to understand why 10%of the vote remains officially uncounted there.

Most of the uncounted votes in New York state are in NewYork City, where Clinton did well, but breaking it down by precinct level showsa possible bias in under-counting in precincts where Sanders might have donebetter. Again, this is impossibleto tell for sure without counting the votes. Separately, there is a petition drive to get NewYork to rerun the primary to include over 100 thousand voters who wereabruptly and suddenly disenfranchised by the local B.O.E.

The current primary/caucus system is complicated, prone toerror, corruptible and now, it seems, perhaps prone to discounting even thosewho legitimately cast their votes.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot