Donald Trump has spent the last week grousing about the Colorado convention, but it was Bernie Sanders that should have been the one complaining.
Trump and the GOP have been going back and forth since Saturday, shifting blame for a confusing and, ultimately, Trump-crushing Colorado vote. Trump accuses the RNC of rigging the game, the GOP of depriving Coloradans of a primary, and the Cruz campaign of playing the delegate game to their advantage (something the Cruz campaign doesn’t deny). GOP Chairman Reince Priebus even, finally, weighed in Wednesday on Twitter, telling Trump to “give us all a break.”
Perhaps thinking that America was distracted by Republican drama, the Colorado Democrats were busy with a bizarre discrepancy of their own. An election volunteer, assigned to call in the results from 10 precincts during Colorado’s Democratic caucus on March 1, punched in the wrong tallies and under-reported Sanders’s results by around a thousand votes.
The mistake seems small, but it has a big impact: based on the original vote tallies, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton split the district’s Democratic delegates 4-4. Based on the new tallies, Bernie Sanders gets an extra delegate, making it 5-3. The Clinton campaign noticed the error and discussed it with the state party, but the state party didn’t tell the Sanders campaign. The Sanders campaign found out this week, when the Denver Post called them for comment on the story.
Colorado’s Democratic party has a final election for delegates on Saturday. The single-delegate boost could give Sanders a leg up on Clinton at the convention, and if he can snag one of Colorado’s superdelegates (there are two that are undecided), he could take a majority of Colorado’s DNC contingent. The odds are clearly in his favor.
Between this error and the top-volume social media freak out Colorado’s Republicans faced after their own convention, it seems both state parties may want to reconsider their delegate processes. Or, at least, the parties may want to start taking advantage of Colorado’s lenient marijuana policies until this election cycle blows over.
