It ain’t over ‘til it’s over: 3 California counties flip to Sanders as DC votes in final primary

While America’s focus has been on the Orlando massacre, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has quietly won three counties that were originally credited to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the California primary.

As Democratic voters in the District of Columbia head to the polls on Tuesday for the final primary election, the Vermont senator is still “feeling the Bern.”

Clinton also lost nine superdelegates this week, according to a report on The Inquisitor.

But wait, didn’t the primary end after the media called it for Clinton just hours before polls opened in several states on June 7th?

Turns out, they got it wrong. The AP’s decision to prematurely crown Clinton the nominee by using anonymous superdelegates that had yet to vote was inaccurate, despite it being endlessly repeated by major media outlets.

The media blackout that Sanders has been railing against since the beginning of the campaign is ongoing, as most news organizations failed to mention that there were more than two million uncounted votes in the Golden State.

Now that they are finally being tabulated, some possibly game-changing wins have emerged for Sanders, who has promised to remain in the campaign until the Democratic convention in July.

Three California counties, Glenn, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara, have now been declared for Sanders, even though they were originally called for Clinton.

California’s Secretary of State, Clinton supporter Alex Padilla, said, “Elections officials have approximately one month to complete their extensive tallying, auditing, and certification work (known as the ‘official canvass’).”

“Most notably, voting by mail has increased significantly in recent years and many vote-by-mail ballots arrive on Election Day,” Padilla added. “In addition, vote-by-mail ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received by county elections officials no later than 3 days after Election Day must be processed. In processing vote-by-mail ballots, elections officials must confirm each voter’s registration status, verify each voter’s signature on the vote-by-mail envelope, and ensure each person did not vote elsewhere in the same election before the ballot can be counted.”

As the latest results stand today, Clinton has 2,211,549 votes (55.5 percent) to Sanders’ 1,734,922 (43.6 percent), with a total of 475 pledged delegates up for grabs.

When the California primary was “called,” the New York Times said Clinton had 269 pledged delegates versus 206 for Sanders, but as more votes are counted, those numbers could shift.

Reports that a number of superdelegates have chosen to rescind their support for Clinton have not been reflected in delegate trackers across mainstream media either, including those of the New York Times and the Guardian.

The Green Papers show Clinton’s superdelegate count at 544 instead of the 577 and even 581 reported elsewhere.

A Truthout.org piece published on Monday titled, “Was the Democratic Primary Just Manipulated, or Was It Stolen?” highlighted the provisional ballot issue in which a vote may not be counted if there are eligibility issues.

Given these ongoing developments, one wonders how a meeting planned between Clinton and Sanders on Tuesday will go. While her supporters would love for him to concede, he will be pushing for a progressive platform to counter-act her neo-liberal, austerity-driven, pro-war agenda.

“What I need to see is a commitment that there will be progressive taxation, that Wall Street and the large corporations who are making billions of dollars a year and billionaires start paying their fair share of taxes so we can address the crises facing inner cities and the fact that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth,” he told ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s former White House Communications Director.

He said that he will also push for free tuition at public colleges and universities, a “massive federal jobs program, and “recognition that climate change is the great global environmental crisis that we face.”