(Newswire.net — April 24, 2016) — WILMINGTON, Del. — One of the major issues Bernie Sanders has addressed in his campaign and pledged to fight is income inequality, however, it turned out to be a bad strategy for winning the elections, The Washington Post reported.
“Poor people don’t vote,” Sanders told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd during the taping of the segment, which is scheduled to air Sunday morning.
Although his campaign has done a good job of attracting young voters, Clinton had prevailed in 16 of 17 states so far as those are the states with the highest income inequality and in fact, poor people in the US just don’t vote, Sanders explained.
“I mean, that’s just a fact. That’s a sad reality of American society,” Sanders said backing up his claims with the 2014 election statistics which showed that 80 percent of poor people did not vote.
“If we can significantly increase voter turnout so that low-income people and working people and young people participated in the political process, if we got a voter turnout of 75 percent, this country would be radically transformed,” Sanders said.
NBC released Sanders comments a day before the scheduled air time while he was campaigning in Delaware. Sanders said “poverty is a death sentence,” citing figures that show the life expectancies of people born in rich neighborhoods are much higher than those born in the poor parts of the same city.
In its Elections report study, the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) ranked the United States dead last in electoral integrity among established Western democracies.
According to research conducted by experts from Harvard University and the University of Sydney in Australia, the electoral integrity is even lower than in some of the poorest countries in Africa.Referring to voter ID laws that have drastically curtailed people’s ability to simply vote for the leader of their choosing, HBO’s John Oliver recently addressed the issue in his comedy show stressing that voting is a right and not a privilege.