Shenanigans

I call shenanigans on the Democratic primary before the 2016 US presidential election.  The process that gave Hillary Clinton the nomination over Bernie Sanders may not have been "rigged," but it was clearly stacked!

Consider the Puerto Rico primary.  In most places, logically enough, the presidential primary voting happens at the same precincts as the voting for down-ballot primaries like governor or state legislature.  In Puerto Rico's primary, however, the Democratic Party made the very late decision to move the presidential primary to a different and smaller group of precincts.  The inevitable result was a much smaller turnout for that primary than the others--it's usually the other way around--and a Clinton victory in a place where Sanders had been leading in the polls.

Clinton's biggest advantage, of course, was the numerous closed primaries where only people who'd registered as Democrats months before were eligible to vote.  And the Democrats purged their rolls so that even thousands of longstanding members found they couldn't vote either. (I'd be more sympathetic to Democrats trying to make an issue of Republican vote suppression in the general election if they weren't in aggressive denial about their own vote-suppression problem!) And of course, there's the super delegates who were largely on Clinton's side.

Maybe none of these individual factors is enough in itself to explain Clinton's victory.  But taken together, they're hard to ignore. (An election for Teamsters union president was thrown out because of much smaller irregularities.) I fear that history may repeat itself in the race between Sanders and Joe Biden.