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

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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.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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