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A crushing victory against Biden

MapBernie wins big in California

By Josh Jones

Bernie's big  California win keeps his delegate lead, but the press isn't reporting it.

When the general news outlets finally admit this, the ridiculous idea that Biden is ahead in delegates will go right out the window. 415 delegates come from California, almost double that of Texas, huge compared to any other state.

From the analysis I have been doing, Bernie must actually ahead in delegates overall, despite the pundits seemingly being unable to predict results for California, and only unable to do so for California.

As of March 4th, 2020, our California, Yolo County Elections Office has counted ~15,000 ballots, which were comprised of Election Day in-person Voting, and Vote by Mail ballots. The Elections Offices will start counting Conditional same day Ballots tomorrow.

There are many thousands of ballots yet to be counted, many of them Vote by Mail. Last 2016 primary there were about 36,000 Democratic votes cast in Yolo County. Yolo has 57,884 registered Democrats as of Feb 2020.

The Yolo numbers so far for Vote by Mail are 3,562 for Bernie, for Biden are 1,363 votes, and 1,718 for Warren.

Yolo Election Day in-person Voting numbers are 3,492 for Bernie, while Biden got 3,426, and 1,725 for Warren.

Bernie seems to be doing much better with Vote by Mail, which are still being counted. There is reason to think that Conditional Ballots will strongly lean toward Bernie as well. With the new rules, Conditional Ballots are what voters get if they use same day registration at their polling place in California. Again, Elections Offices will start to count Conditional Ballots tomorrow.

If you're wondering, Josh Jones, Skyler Blakeslee, and Desiree Rojas, three of us who started voluntarily campaigning for Bernie back in summer of 2015, went to the Elections Office today to make sure things were working properly, and to find out what was going on with the vote numbers.

No one should be complacent. In 2016 Bernie campaign volunteers all over California had to hound the Elections Offices to make sure they counted all the Provisional Ballots. It took until the end of the month to get them all counted, and the same rules apply this time. At the end of that month in 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders had won Yolo County. This time in 2020, Sen. Sanders has won the vast majority of the fifty eight counties of California.

Anyone who can should go to their County Elections Office, where you can politely ask them questions about the vote numbers and the process. They will hand you a stapled printout with the election details; they have them ready for you. They will answer your questions. But we should make sure they know we are paying attention.

Above is part of what we found, and I'm still analyzing the numbers.
Bernie won California resoundingly in 2020, but it seems the news can project the delegate allocation for all the other states, except for California. I think we know why.

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Comments

10 responses to “A crushing victory against Biden”

  1. Robert D Canning

    Can you explain how the Democratic delegates are apportioned in California? Do you believe Sanders will win all 415?

    Reply
  2. Alan Miller

    JJ, this article is confusing – I don’t know what you are implying.

    Reply
  3. Josh Jones

    To Robert D Canning:
    To your first question, yes, I can explain CA delegate apportionment, though it might get a bit wonky.
    To your second question, no, it is unlikely Sanders will win all 415 delegates. However, Sen. Sanders won the state of California, as he won the state of Utah and Colorado, and typical delegate allocation first comes from the numbers reported after the first count batch, which has been reported to the Secretary of State.
    Sanders must receive more delegates than Biden given the initial count from all County Elections Offices. These number will change over the month, as Elections Offices continue to count Vote by Mail, Provisional and Conditional ballots.
    This is common practice in other states.
    Indeed, all the other Super Tuesday state delegates have been allocated from the initial counts reported. Again, these will change. It is impossible to get exact numbers the first day after any large election. And yet the other states have delegates allocated, all except California.
    An example of this further reporting of numbers of votes for each candidate, past the initial count, is Solano County, wherein ~36,000 votes were initially reported, and yet ~25,000 are yet to be counted. Another way to look at it, ~20,000 Vote by Mail were counted in the first reporting, but ~14,000 VbM were counted afterward, and ~3,000 VbM are uncounted.
    Reporting that Biden is ahead in delegates while ignoring California is a simple game. Biden is the “front runner” for a time and makes the news rounds, creating an impression for newswatchers. All before the next Large Tuesday vote. Gaming the system this way to advantage a candidate with cooked numbers is dishonest, not reflecting the true choice of all the people. It actually risks launching a less popular candidate, which is problematic for winning against Trump.
    As far as apportionment of delegates, this is done by percentage, though those who receive less than 15% gain no delegates. Therefore, the percentages allocated must use a multiplier reflecting the percentages of the winning candidates, and thus the delegates allocated.
    If Sanders wins 40% and Biden wins 20%, but the others won <15%, then Sanders allocation of delegates goes up, as does those of Biden, proper to the multiplier.
    Nevertheless, we should be allocating all 415 delegates from California, and Sander won California.
    Furthermore, in Yolo County, Sanders vs Biden Vote by Mail numbers are 2.6:1 so far. But VbMs are still being counted at the Yolo Elections Office. Regarding Conditional same-day Voting ballots, it’s likely that new enthusiastic voters used this. In Solano County 4,036 Conditionals and Provisionals have not been counted, and will begin tomorrow, probably finished by next Friday after tomorrow. In Yolo County the same applies, and it’s likely that Sanders will gain even higher numbers, and so, more delegates from California.
    Basically, the initial numbers of delegates must be used, from the initial numbers, and then the nearly double amount of votes must alter the delegate count further over time, most likely in the favor of Sanders. But Sanders has a much higher CA delegate count that is being described nationally.

    Reply
  4. Keith

    Bernie is all but done. The DNC made sure of it by having Buttigieg and Klobuchar drop out before Super Tuesday (or Thursday if you believe Biden) and having Warren stay in the race draining Sander’s votes. Warren has since dropped out without endorsing Sanders. For the life of me I don’t know why Sanders doesn’t fight back? The DNC stole the election from him in 2016 and he took that lying down just as he seems to be doing the same thing now. Sanders supporters should be livid. Now Democrats are stuck with Biden who doesn’t seem to even know what day of the week it is with his increasing dementia. Good luck with that!

    Reply
  5. Keith

    Biden leads the current delegate count 664 to 573 for Sanders.
    Biden also has all the momentum, Bernie is toast.
    Bernie should run as an Independent, what he actually is, to get back at the DNC and their dirty tricks.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-presidential-delegates-tracker/

    Reply
  6. Keith

    Question, I posted another comment @ 12 hours ago. Where is it, why didn’t it post?

    Reply
  7. Colin

    Sorry for the delay Kieth. Just volunteers here.

    Reply
  8. Keith

    Did anyone see that yesterday Klobuchar said she was joining the Biden ticket? She later claimed it was a slip up, but was it? Was she promised that in order to help Biden as part of her getting out of the election before Super Tuesday?
    https://wwmt.com/news/local/klobuchar-slips-up-says-she-will-join-the-ticket-with-biden-later-corrects-herself

    Reply
  9. Ron Glick

    Crushing? The Secretary of State has Sanders ahead of Biden by 7.3 %. On election night Sanders was ahead by almost 9%. The absentee vote has been trending Biden. This shouldn’t be a surprise since in 16 Sanders matched Clinton on primary day but lost the absentee vote by around half a million votes.
    Also in 16 Sanders ended up with 46% of the vote but this time he has about 33.8%. Currently Sanders has a million votes less than he did in the CA Primary in 16. Of course with three million votes left to be counted Sanders is currently on pace to to tie his 16 total.
    Time will tell but the Sanders strategy of turning out new voters doesn’t seem to be materializing either in California or in the nation as a whole.

    Reply
  10. Randy

    It is not a conspiracy. It is widely acknowledged that CA takes longer than other states to count the vote. Why is that? Because CA wants to get as many people to vote as possible and it wants to make sure it counts them correctly. Just this election there are new “get out the vote” measures in place that allow people to register and vote same day. That just adds to the counting burden though because now the election offices have to confirm that person didn’t register and vote elsewhere. By adding complexity CA has prioritized a wider voting base and an accurate count over the speed of counting. Again, these are all good things if you believe in democracy. If anything it should help someone like Sanders who gets more support from college students and other young people who are the most likely to take advantage of a program like same day registration. The largest factor that I see to Sanders being behind on the delegate count is because he failed to win over black voters who have backed his opponent in a major way. Again, not a conspiracy, it is just people exercising their right to vote. You also don’t need to go to the Yolo election office in person (burning fossil fuels to get there). You can visit their website. They have a detailed breakdown of the votes that remain to be counted (including ballot type). You can also read stories in the Davis Enterprise to learn that election officials expect to have another update (but not a final count) by this coming Friday. Finally, Keith is so transparent, much like the candidate Trump he so obviously supports. Sure, if you want Trump to be reelected, then by all means Sanders should run as an independent. I will go by what Sanders says though and here is what he said at a recent Arizona rally: “During the rally, Sanders said that everyone there assembled for one common goal: To get President Donald Trump out of office. He called Trump the “most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.”
    “I think we all believe that we cannot contain a person in the White House that is a pathological liar, somebody who is running a corrupt administration, somebody who has apparently never read the Constitution of the United States, somebody who thinks that he is above the law,” said Sanders with the crowd cheering him on. “So, in November, we are going to teach Donald Trump a lesson in democracy.””
    Eyes on the prize people, ignore the trolls and kick Trump out!

    Reply

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