Bernie Sanders has electors in California, the California Secretary of State confirmed on its website Friday, but few media outlets are reporting on this stunning situation. In light of the targeted state write-in campaign that aims to elect Bernie Sanders by using rights afforded to Americans by the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, suddenly adding Californians to the mix, the largest group of voters in the country, seems as if it might be major news.
Apparently, it’s not major news to the majority of U.S. journalists, though. So, here’s the scoop, in case it’s important to you.
If you are one of the over 18 million registered voters in California and would like to vote for Bernie Sanders in the General Election, you can. Bernie won’t be on the ballot, but he is an official write-in candidate. Electors for Bernard “Bernie” Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard have been certified by the State of California.
While some Green Party activists have been urging Californians not to write in Bernie Sanders, but instead to vote for their own candidate, according to the latest updates available from the California Secretary of State, Greens made up less than one-half of one percent of registered voters in California. Multiple teams of campaigners for writing in Bernie in strategic states believe that Bernie could win the popular vote in California, and therefore all 55 of the state’s electors. Many Greens are also saying that Sanders opposes write-in votes for him. As the Inquisitr reported earlier, Bernie Sanders was videotaped saying that in a state where it’s a close race, he wants Clinton to beat Trump. Writing Sanders in could cause a state to swing from Trump to Clinton in states with close races, and in a situation like that, Bernie still didn’t tell anyone how to vote.
First off, California is hardly a swing state. California has almost twice as many registered Democrats as they do Republicans and over four million registered voters who have no party preference established with the state. KCRA reported this summer that almost half of all independent, vote-by-mail voters wanted to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate, but only 15 percent requested the correct ballot that would have allowed them to vote in the California primary election. KCRA reported that most of those independent voters who were left out of the primary wanted to vote for Sen. Sanders.
Secondly and brilliantly, write-in organizers have a been appealing to Trump supporters in California to vote for Bernie Sanders because it’s so unlikely that Trump could take California, they might as well help Sanders prevent Clinton from earning them. According to Electoral Vote, as of November 1, Clinton is set to take 323 electoral votes, while Trump lags behind at 215. Should Clinton lose California to either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, she could drop below the 270 electoral vote threshold.
Vote Progressive CA has a handy voter’s guide to help progressive voters, especially those who support Bernie Sanders, figure out which liberals truly represent their philosophies.
Sanders supporters can’t help but notice that Bernie Sanders not only seems to have gotten most of his “bern” back, but he also doesn’t seem to mention Clinton by name as much as he did before all of the write-in campaigns. Could he, like so many other Americans, hope that the strategic write-in plans end up being successful?
For those unfamiliar with the write-in strategy, according to the National Archives, if no candidate wins over 50 percent of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the president by choosing from one of the top three candidates. The strategy is simply to deny both Trump and Clinton their 270 electoral votes and then leave the burden of choosing between the two least popular candidates in modern history and Bernie Sanders for the next House of Representatives that will be sworn-in in January 2017.
[Featured Image by Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Cropped and resized/CC BY-SA 2.0]