There is always nonsense on the Internet. But lately there’s been far too much of a particular kind of nonsense: conspiracy theories about election fraud in the Democratic primary. Even though this stuff is not allowed here, at least in theory, it’s been persistent: here it is, over and over and over and over again, and that’s just in the comment section of one diary from today. So it needs to be debunked. Here goes.
Conspiracy: Although it’s metastasized into all sorts of different forms, here is the version I’ve seen most often both here and on social media. It claims that Bernie Sanders actually won the primary — that more people cast votes for him than for Clinton, but due to widespread fraud and vote rigging the results were changed. As ‘evidence’, the promoters cite early unweighted exit polls, which were generally more favorable to Sanders than the actual results.
Why this is nonsense: First of all, the ‘evidence’ is terrible. Unweighted exit polls are not considered particularly accurate. They are often biased towards younger voters and also towards more passionate voters. As an illustration of this, in the South Carolina exit polls, 7% of the electorate was reported to be in the 18-24 age group, and 19% over 65. But checking the official voter rolls after the election, those numbers were actually 2% and 32%.
More importantly, look at the rest of the evidence. National polls? Clinton led by between 5 and 15 percent throughout the primary. This is consistent with the outcome, which was Clinton by about 12%. It is not consistent with the conspiracy-theory outcome of a Sanders win. State polls? The average, before the last primary, was that they overestimated Clinton's vote share by 1.8%. Again, the election results are very close to the state polls. In fact they’re more favorable to Sanders. This is again consistent with the outcome and not consistent at all with the conspiracy theory.
Now of course some people will say “well, couldn’t the polls have been rigged TOO?” But now the conspiracy doesn’t just involve hundreds of election officials nationwide, which was already nuts. It has to involve hundreds of political scientists and media figures as well. All of whom have to have maintained perfect secrecy. Oh, and even though the conspiracy was so extraordinarily competent as to be practically omnipotent, they forgot to rig the exit polls too. The X-Files producers would have rejected this plot as ridiculous.
Variation 1: California was rigged, either by election fraud or by deliberately not counting legitimate votes.
Actually, no. The outcome, which looks likely to be a high single digit win for Clinton, was consistent with public polling showing an average of a 5-point lead for Clinton. A 2-4 point discrepancy is totally normal. (In this case it may have been affected by issues with sampling Hispanic voters. Most polls had the race close among Hispanics, but a county-by-county analysis indicates that Clinton probably won Hispanic voters handily. This may have been due to oversampling younger Hispanics versus older Hispanics. Again, though, this kind of error is normal.) And the outcome was also consistent with demographic estimates — Benchmark Politics forecast Clinton +8.
As far as counting votes, um, they’re counting votes. They’re really, really slow about doing it. You can see how many votes remain to be counted here. Sanders has cut into the margin a little bit as provisional ballots have been counted (since some of them were NPP), but any reasonable extrapolation suggests that Clinton is likely to win by somewhere between 7 and 9 percent in the end.
Variation 2: Clinton’s win was solely due to the primary process. If [process reform X] had happened, she would have lost.
Actually, no. Nate Silver does a pretty good job of debunking this. Open primaries in every state wouldn’t have been enough. Open primaries just in the closed primary states wouldn’t have been enough.
The only process reform that would have given Sanders a chance would have been to hold caucuses in every state instead of primaries. That might have gotten him nominated, but it wouldn’t exactly have been a model of a democratic election — no secret ballot, tremendous time commitment required.
Caveats:
- None of this should be taken to indicate that there were no irregularities in the election or that they are not worthy of discussion. GOP-instigated voter suppression in AZ, by cutting the number of polling places was a serious problem, as was the improper purge of voters in Brooklyn. Our elections aren’t perfect and we have significant work to do to make them better. What I am saying is that the claims of deliberate election fraud on behalf of Hillary Clinton or her campaign are not supported by the evidence. I am also saying that the claims that election irregularities had any serious effect on the outcome of the Democratic primary are not supported by the evidence.
- Just to be clear: I am absolutely not trying to attack Bernie Sanders here, or his supporters. He has NOT promoted this crap, and the vast majority of his supporters have not either. Sanders voters should be proud of the impressive race he ran and the important issues he advanced.