Bernie Sanders: Election ‘Not Rigged’, Revolution Will Continue After The Convention


Bernie Sanders apparently does not agree with most of his hardcore supporters who feel the Democratic Primary has been rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor.

Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited his home town of Burlington, VT to discuss the state of the campaign with his top advisers today, concluding with an appearance to give a statement to the media regarding his plans and briefly send his condolences to the families of those who perished in the Orlando mass shooting last night.

While Sanders reiterated his plan to carry the campaign through to the bitter end at the Democratic National Convention on July 25th, he emphasized an important tenet of his platform: this is a “political revolution” that “does not stop on election day.”

This point was further supported with his call to young Americans to get involved in politics on the local level by showing up to meetings, campaigning for political positions, and continuing to vote after November.

One major aspect of Sanders’ campaign that marks the stark contrast between him and the two presidential front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is his continued emphasis on young people becoming more politically aware and sticking to their convictions until they see the change they are looking for.

A couple weeks ago, Sanders told CBS news that he didn’t feel the election was rigged against him, but that the entire process was very “dumb” and has a lot of problems, especially the issue of superdelegates:

“I wouldn’t use the word rigged, because we knew what the words were – but what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York state, where three million people who are Democrats or Republicans could not participate, where you have situation where over 400 superdelegates came on board Clinton’s campaign before anybody else was in the race, eight months before the first vote was cast. That’s not rigged. I think it’s just a dumb process which has certainly disadvantaged our campaign.”

Many of his supporters feel that this is either wrong or basically the same thing as being “rigged”. Those who feel he is wrong to say this are most likely some who experienced one of the many effects of voter suppression, such as voter registrations being purged from databases, party affiliations being mysteriously switched and the obvious discrepancy between exit polls and vote tallies. California, especially, seemed to carry some of the strangest problems, such as how certain voters needed to know a password to get a ballot and a massive difference in the number of registered voters vs. the number of votes tallied.

Those who feel the system is set up against them are pretty much in agreement with Bernie and have vowed to continue the struggle, as he suggests, and carry the revolution beyond the convention in July.

Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
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