In the latest episode in the annals of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”, we learned today that the Sanders campaign is requesting a recount of the machine and absentee ballot totals in the Kentucky primary.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Tuesday requested a recount in the close Kentucky presidential primary against front-runner Hillary Clinton, state election officials said on Tuesday.
The recanvass will take place at all 120 county boards of election on Thursday, according to the Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes.
Clinton won Kentucky by just 1,924 votes, according to the unofficial totals posted on the secretary of state’s elections page. She won Jefferson County, which includes Louisville and is the largest by far of the state’s 120 counties, by nearly 10 times that amount
I will say that it is Sen. Sanders’s absolute right to request such a recount due to the narrow margin of victory. I will add that the time and expense to conduct such a recount is a burden that will likely be borne by the commonwealth of Kentucky. So in asking for a process that is within his rights but will consume public resources, the Sanders campaign has to be looking for some result. This is what perplexes me.
Clearly this is not about picking up the delegates needed to come out ahead in the overall primary race since even if it were found that not a single ballot were cast for Clinton, it would hardly put a dent in the overall lead or change the math significantly.
The rationale provided by the campaign is that it will provide “transparency”. I am not exactly clear on what that means. Others have theorized this may support a future fundraising initiative, but that appears too arch even for the Sanders campaign.
Based on the rhetoric flying around about a “rigged” process, I am going to speculate that the purpose is to show a substantial net gain in votes for Sanders — with the ultimate hope being a net gain that would make him the “winner”.
This will fit in nicely with the Sanders narrative that Allison Lundergan Grimes was in the tank for Hillary and intentionally tweeted on election night that Clinton was the “unofficial winner". This was designed to — well that I am not sure of - maybe demoralize Sanders supporters or give Clinton a moral victory?
Maybe they think this will bolster an argument to the superdelegates that they should jump to his side in spite of the overall pledged delegate deficit but that seems just as unlikely.
It strikes me ultimately that this is one more bunch of sour grapes designed to further de-legitimize the entire nominating process in the eyes of Sanders’s more die-hard supporters. They can only be losing if the entire system is fraudulent, and there is wholesale ballot stuffing for Clinton. This is a very dangerous game he is playing because these spurious claims of fraud will be very difficult to walk back and, even if he eventually does, will never sway his supports convinced he was robbed.