By Casey Harper
The Nevada State Democratic Party issued a statement explaining exactly how Hillary Clinton was able to edge out a win at the convention Saturday despite Sen. Bernie Sanders going in with more delegate slots. A raucous protest broke out after the convention among furious Sanders supporters that eventually got so out of hand the hosting hotel forced them to shut it down.
The Dems issued a Monday statement on Medium explaining how Sanders’ poor campaign organizing cost him, saying “it all comes down to simple math.”
- Based on the county convention results, Bernie Sanders had 2,124 delegate slots to the State Convention and Hillary Clinton had 1,722 delegate slots to the State Convention.
- On Saturday at the State Convention, after all of the alternates were seated, Hillary Clinton filled 1,695 of her delegate slots and Bernie Sanders only filled 1,662 at the State Convention — giving Clinton a 33-delegate margin of victory.
- Clinton only had 27 delegate positions vacant on Saturday. Sanders left 462 vacant. Clinton filled 98 percent of her available delegate slots at the State Convention, and Sanders only filled 78 percent of his available delegate slots.
- In plain terms, the Clinton campaign organized and got nearly all of their delegates to the State Convention. The Sanders campaign did not.
The party said the rules were consistent with previous conventions have been run, rebutting allegations they altered the rules to favor Clinton. The Dems also responded to allegations that 64 of Sanders’ delegates were turned away. The group said actually only 8 attempted to register and the rest were ineligible because they either were not registered Democrats before the deadline or their personal information like address and date of birth could not be found. They allege their appeals to Sanders to correct the issue went unanswered.
It’s unfortunate that while we were making these efforts to ensure that we conducted a fair State Convention, the Sanders campaign was deliberately sharing misinformation about how the convention operates to get people riled up. And after starting this fire, they had no capacity — and no desire — to control their own supporters from hurling threats and insults and being disruptive to the proceedings. We were forced to conclude the State Convention at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel quickly because event security no longer had the capacity to control the unruly and unpredictable crowd.
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