May 24, 2016

Bernie Sanders Requests a Recanvass of the Kentucky Primary

“He’s in this until every last vote is counted and he’s fighting for every last delegate,” said a campaign spokesman.

Mariel Calloway/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Bernie Sanders has formally requested a recanvass of the results of last Tuesday’s Kentucky’s presidential primary, where he lost narrowly statewide to Hillary Clinton, according to the Associated Press. State election officials will review the final tallies from electronic voting machines and absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary.

“He’s in this until every last vote is counted and he’s fighting for every last delegate,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs told the AP.

A recanvass isn’t a recount; it’s merely a review of the voting machine and absentee ballot data reported to the secretary of state. The request for a recanvass comes as Sanders and the Democratic National Committee begin to work out how his ideas will be incorporated into the party’s platform committee, and Sanders slams Clinton for backing out of a previously agreed-to debate in California, calling her move “insulting to the people of California.”

According to the Kentucky State Board of Elections, Sanders came up 1,924 votes short of Clinton, out of 454,573 votes cast. The AP notes that both candidates picked up 27 delegates in Kentucky. One additional delegate will be awarded from the state’s sixth congressional district, where Clinton is ahead by about 500 votes, according to the current count. Sanders has a chance, then, to win that one additional delegate if the recanvass swings that district to his favor.

But it would hardly make a difference in the overall state of the race, where Sanders trails Clinton in the pledged delegate count by 271 delegates. When superdelegates are added in, Clinton’s lead swells to 766, and she needs only about 80 more delegates to win the nomination. There’s a good chance she’ll reach that total on June 7, when California, New Jersey, and four smaller states hold contests.

Based on those figures, Clinton has already declared herself the presumptive nominee. “I will be the nominee for my party,” she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo last week. “That is already done, in effect. There’s no way that I won’t be.”

Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear told local TV station WSAZ that his office had received 76 calls to its election fraud hotline during the primary concerning voting machine issues, voter identification problems, electioneering, poll disruption, and vote buying, among other issues.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate