The RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL RACE, 2016: And a Warning from JFK..

“It’s scandalous,” former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner complained. “It’s absolutely scandalous and it really feeds into what Sanders supporters believe… that this whole thing was rigged right from the beginning.”

The Associated Press announcement, on Monday, that Hillary Clinton is now decisively the Democrat nominee and Bernie Sanders is basically out of the race has angered a number of Sanders supporters and people in the Sanders campaign.

The AP declared that “commitments” from superdelegates on Monday gave Clinton enough total delegates to win the nomination. This action by the AP has been condemned by critics not just for being a breach of rules, but for being ultimately an attempt to cynically undermine the voting process and suppress voter turnout for Sanders.

By prematurely adding these superdelegates to their equation, the media creates a skewed, confused picture of the Sanders’ campaign’s chances, essentially aiming to discourage potential Sanders voters from bothering to cast their vote: because, according to the AP, it’s already a done deal and Hillary is the nominee.

But the mainstream media collusion with the Clinton campaign has been evident for months; and this illegitimate act is only the latest in a long line of clear signs that an underhanded operation has been run against the Sanders campaign and its supporters.

In an article by Ken Klippenstein, Paul Gottinger and Joseph Hickman and titled ‘Did Clinton Know About AP Victory in Advance’, attention is drawn to the fact that the Clinton camp appears to have sent a fundraising email celebrating the AP article that prematurely announced Hillary as the victorious Democrat nominee. As they note, ‘The image central to the email contained metadata suggesting it was produced on June 4th – two days before AP’s story was published. The metadata also included the words “secret win”.’

They continue, ‘the image is titled “secret-win-V2-060416c_02.png”–060416 ostensibly being the date the image was produced. If the image was produced days before the AP story went live, a very obvious question arises: how did the Clinton campaign know AP would declare her the nominee?‘

This seems to add fuel to the growing suspicion online that Clinton and the Associated Press colluded to use that announcement to ‘suppress or otherwise discourage Sanders votes in the California primary, for fear of an embarrassing Sanders win in the most delegate-rich state (Recent polls have consistently found Sanders and Clinton to be a statistical tie in California).’

Glenn Greenwald summed up the scenario aptly and described this latest underhanded manuever as “the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary. The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identity the media organization – incredibly – conceals. The decisive edifice of super-delegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that their nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward and undemocratic sputter.”

Of course, many would cite the entire superdelegate business as *designed* to protect the system from being inconvenienced by the will of the people. As the AntiMedia recently put it, ‘The superdelegate process is complicated, as we’ve noted before, but they have one essential function: to prevent candidates like Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination.’

The illegitimacy of the American democratic process has become so pronounced this time around that even the BBC has starting asking serious questions. A recent BBC article notes, ‘Mr Sanders has won five state contests in a row and seven of the last eight. If he were an American football team he’d be poised for the playoffs. If he were a prize fighter, he’d be tuning up for a title bout. Instead his pledged-delegate deficit to Mrs Clinton has gone from daunting to only fractionally less daunting. Over the course of his recent run, the Vermont Senator has picked up a net of just 91 delegates, despite winning Wisconsin 56% to 43%, Utah 79% to 20% and Washington 72% to 27%.’

But I said a few months ago that Hillary is so unpopular with *actual voters* that it would probably require fraud and trickery to push her over the finish line. I had no doubt, even before the primaries began, that there would be trickery for Hillary’s sake – because Hillary is ‘Bush 2.o’, simply the other side of the same coin.

And that is precisely what appears to have played out.

There is now such a widespread perception of fraud that it is hard to imagine what the mood is going to be if/when Hillary wins the presidency and drives up to the White House.

Is the mass media – which has unreservedly done everything it can to smooth the path for Hillary – simply going to continue insisting everything is peachy and that Hillary is the popular choice?

Even if we assume that vote-rigging to some degree or another goes on anyway – and acknowledge that the ‘system’ has been set up to be self-protecting – what has gone on this year has been so blatant that it’s as if even the illusion of true democracy isn’t even important anymore.

Donald Trump, despite having won the Republican nomination, was frank with his view, saying “The system is rigged, it’s crooked.”

Most of those angry at perceived electoral fraud aren’t simply talking in general terms or voicing mere suspicion, but talking about *actual*, flat-out fraud.

As the Independent Thinker 2016 blog puts it, ‘They are not even referring to the fact that millions of Sanders voters have not been allowed to vote, due to the fact that they had the audacity to register as Independents, a move they undoubtedly thought would allow them freedom of choice in their voting.’

No, not that – but *actual* fraud.

Among some of the specifics, he informs us that ‘When we that ‘the Diebold voting machines, being used in the Democratic primaries, we find that they are supplied by a company called Smartmatic, which is owned by billionaire George Soros. It seems that George Soros being in charge of the voting machines would be a huge news story, as Soros is also Hillary Clinton’s largest donor.’

But it hasn’t been a big story at all.

There are numerous eyewitness descriptions and also phone videos of blatant election rigging at the Nevada Democratic Convention.

Dan Rolle, a congressional candidate in Nevada, put up a video explaining the backstory behind the Nevada convention. ‘Basically, NDems enacted some rules that were designed to give convention authority to the state chair. That group challenged these rules in court. That challenge was denied, essentially because the court didn’t feel it should intervene in party politics. Fast forward – the same group gets the requisite number of signatures to change these rules. Roberta ignores this, and enacts her rules. Fast forward. Clinton wins by a few delegates, but over 64 delegates were rejected. By the board she chose. The argument is that with these votes, Sanders wins. Also worth noting, many were turned away because they simply could not find parking.’

He continues, ‘At the end of the convention, we motioned the party platform. I called for Roberta’s removal here (see video). My mic was cut. Fast forward: The delegates are counted. Roberta denies a recount, closes the convention at her discretion. She then bolts off stage. This, while being flanked by police.‘

Most of the videos are here.

Election Fraud 2016 is the best place to keep track of all of the instances or allegations of electoral fraud that have been occurring – and it pretty much TAKES a whole website devoted to it in order to keep up with the stories.

All of this has been going on for a while, of course.

A few weeks ago, the Clinton campaign was widely accused of cheating in Kentucky, with 4000 votes discounted to allow for a Hillary victory.

There were serious ‘voting irregularities’ cited in the case of the New York primary in April. Bernie Sanders’ campaign team understandably complained about these voting irregularities at the New York state primary, calling them “absurd”: more than 125,000 Democrats were unable to cast their ballots due to a mixture of broken voting machines, missing ballots and purged voter rolls.

And in April in New York too, foreshadowing this contentious AP announcement on Monday, most of the Hillary-aligned Establishment media downplayed or entirely omitted any reference to the irregularities, choosing instead to ramp up the Hillary propaganda machine and all but announce her as the Democratic candidate, essentially indicating that Sanders’ bid was already over – that was in April. ‘Hillary Clinton: New York Primary Win Means ‘Victory Is in Sight” declared NBC News at that time.

Prior to New York, there had already been significant problems in multiple states that had left many thousands of Americans as victims of fraud or otherwise without the ability to vote for their chosen candidates. Arizona’s Secretary of State openly admitted that fraud had occurred on a large scale in her state. Detailed analysis already strongly indicated that state databases were probably hacked and manipulated.

A petition titled ‘Open an investigation into Hillary Clinton and the DNC for Election fraud‘ has already reached over 65,000 signatures on Change.org. Its originator observes, ‘Bernie Sanders is dominating. He has won every online poll, Alan Grayson’s (D-Florida) super delegate poll, and has received the most individual campaign contributions as well as the largest rallies American politics has ever seen.. There is no way that Hillary Clinton (who has some of the worst polling data in regards to trustworthiness and one of the lowest senate approval ratings on either side) is winning by the margins she is statistically.’

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Rigging an American election isn’t new; it happened in very recent memory, specifically when last-minute ‘voting irregularities’ allowed George W. Bush to be installed into the Presidency in place of Al Gore in 2000.

This was accomplished largely by illegally purging thousands of black voters off of the Florida voter rolls, creating an obvious and unfair advantage to Bush. Jeb Bush happened to be the Republican Governor of the State of Florida at the time, which was very useful. Antonin Scalia and his conservative ‘justices’ also skirted democracy and intervened on the Republicans’ side by stopping the election vote-count – and were therefore probably part of the scheme.

There are other ways to do it too: for example, in the 1960s they shot Robert F. Kennedy to make sure he couldn’t run for the presidency.

But that was the sixties; nowadays such obvious and brutal measures aren’t necessary.

The establishment insiders and apparatuses currently rigging things for a Hillary presidency appear simply to be doing it much earlier and more systematically than was the case for Bush in 2000. But it has always seemed likely that Hillary, like Bush, is the establishment candidate with some pre-planned agendas or operations necessitating her being in the Oval Office – which, in turn, would necessitate strategic fraud in key places to ensure that it happens.

Even at the risk of alienating or outraging thousands or millions more American voters.

What has been particularly unsavory in some of the mainstream news media’s coverage of these incidents, such as the one in Nevada, is that the situation has been portrayed as a case of Sanders supporters being unruly, turning violent or being close to rioting – the same broadcasters who have shown Sanders’ (mostly young) supporters ‘behaving badly’ tend not to mention the *reason* for it: specifically, that in many cases, they’ve been denied the chance to vote or have encountered blatant acts of voter suppression.

Quite what all of these people are going to feel or do if Hillary proceeds to the presidency is difficult to envision; but we should tend to remember the scenes that greeted George W. Bush sixteen years ago as he was driven towards the White House surrounded by protesters chanting ‘Hail to the Thief’.

The scene became so infamous that Radiohead named a song and an album after it.

What’s particularly sad in this instance is that a particularly young generation of voters – certainly also including many first-time voters – have just tried to exercise their democratic freedom and have encountered a system rigged against them.

If they were disenfranchised with establishment politics and media already, god knows what they’re going to do next time around. I’ve heard many political pundits in the UK say that if more young people came out to vote in elections, it would change politics overnight. In other words their disenfranchisement or apathy leaves voting power disproportionately in the hands of older generations, who tend to be – on the whole – much more conservative and pro-establishment.

In America in the last several months, it has been clear that the Sanders campaign has energised and mobilised legions of young people with a progressive outlook – instead of celebrating this, most of the establishment-run media has either dismissed or even vilified them, essentially telling them that this isn’t their election and they should stay at home and watch cat videos on YouTube instead.

But the kind of momentum and energy the Sanders campaign has engendered isn’t something that can just go away or be put back in the bottle. Eventually – some day soon or some time further down the line – that momentum and frustration is going to have to be expressed via some other avenue.

This tends to bring to mind something John F. Kennedy once said; “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”