Election Board Scandal: Bernie Sanders Loses Votes, Hillary Clinton Granted Votes, Voters Erased

Right now, there are a lot of issues going on with the 2016 presidential election, and it’s beginning to turn quite ugly. On one hand, there is the issue of over 125,000 voters being erased from rolls ahead of the election dates in Brooklyn, New York. In another situation, the Chicago Election Board is dealing with a situation where audits have been done and witnesses have seen hand-counted votes actually differ greatly from machine-counted votes and alter the final tallies for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

The NY Post is reporting that the Board of Elections has suspended the top official in its Brooklyn office without pay. This is being done so that an investigation can be done to figure out how some 126,000 Democratic voters from the borough were purged from the system before the primary election this past week.

The board has said they will “fully cooperate,” and comptroller Scott Stringer says that this situation could have huge implications on the election of the next president.

“Why is it alleged that 125,000 people have been removed from the voter rolls? Why did 60,000 people receive notices to vote that didn’t have the primary date? Why were people told they were in the wrong polling place time and time again? The next president of the United States could very easily be decided tonight and yet the incompetence of the Board of Elections puts a cloud over these results.”

Stringer plans on auditing the Board of Elections, and this is after over 1,000 complaints came in from different voters. It is said to be the largest number of complaints that have been received for a general election in the past five years.

In 2012, there were a mere 150 complaints total. On Tuesday, more than 1,000.

Many voters were told they weren’t registered and that was the biggest complaint of all. After that, the second biggest complaint were voters being told they weren’t registered with a specific political party and were therefore denied ballots.

While New York is having a huge problem of its own, Chicago may actually be having an even bigger election board scandal.

Chicago Election Board Meeting 2016-04-05 Showing It should be 56.7% for Bernie 18.4% Swing https://t.co/5ZO05gR94y

— edmund katso (@ekatso) April 22, 2016

There is a group of citizens who believe that some of the hand-counted votes vs. machine-counted votes were altered and that the tallies for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were completely misrepresented. The Daily Kos is stating that the group spoke at a meeting of the Chicago board of elections, and it was revealed that 21 votes for Sanders were deleted while 49 votes for Clinton were added.

The group says this was done in order to match the machine count, and the change actually altered the results in one precinct by 20 percent of the overall votes cast. In this case, the actual tally for Bernie Sanders was 56.7 percent of the vote in his favor, but the machine-manipulated tally had him losing with 47.5 percent of the vote.

That’s an incredible swing of 18.4 percent.

In the video below, there is a lot of information, but around the 24:30 mark, the poll workers begin giving testimony as to what was seen during the audit.

The accusations here is that the Chicago Election Board is not performing audits as they should be since vote alterations are being missed. They are performing audits that are not paying attention to every detail and that is proven by how hand-counted votes differ from machine-counted votes.

Not only were things missed or ignored, but a number of board members would watch as votes were hand-counted and then changed so that machine voting totals were equal. The problem is that the numbers didn’t always match up and it doesn’t show exactly what was counted during the audit.

Therein lies the discrepancy and percentage swing for Bernie Sanders’ total.

While there is a lot of chaos going on as to who will win the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential election, there is even more with the election board scandal. If some of the claims made in New York and Chicago turn out to be true, then there could be serious ramifications to those involved. Some are already being pinpointed and blamed, but there could be many others involved.

[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]