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As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders racked up impressive late-March 2016 primary and caucus wins across three states (Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington) in one day, his success prompted renewed interest in an older social media rumor claiming that his support had been bolstered through the tactic of busing large numbers of youngsters' in from out of state to crowd out legitimate voters. News reporting on March 2016 primaries and caucuses often focused on massive voter turnout in some states, a phenomenon that led to hours-long lines at the polls and ballot shortages. But rumors claiming the Sanders campaign deliberately bused disruptive youngsters to those events didn't originate with candidate's March 2016 wins — two months earlier, Sanders had become visibly annoyed when a question on that subject was posed to him by editor Al Hunt at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast in Des Moines: In the heated exchange captured in the above above, Hunt appeared to suppress amusement as he posed a question that included reference to out-of-state young people showing up at caucuses: Hunt didn't include any qualification for the question, such as evidence uncovered by Bloomberg Politics (or anyone else) that the Sanders campaign had actually engaged in any disruptive busing efforts. Other reporting from that news outlet suggested the same claim had been levied by Clinton supporters against Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential contest. Evidence of the same accusation being lobbed at Obama remains on a few sites, including Politico, where a December 2007 blog item quotes a Clinton campaign spokesman as saying: A visibly agitated Sanders replied to Hunt's suggestion that his campaign was engaging in the same sort of manipulation that the Obama campaign had been accused of by Clintonites back in 2008: Sanders referenced David Brock, whose role in the Clinton's 2016 campaign was described thusly by the Los Angeles Times: Sanders also referenced Brock's admitted involvement in the deliberate smearing of Anita Hill, who testified during Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991 that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the EEOC: A pair of items published in the New York Times in late January 2016 possibly fed the disruptive busing rumors. On 24 January 2016 that newspaper reported that the Bernie Sanders youth brigade was on the move, and the campaign was planning to transport Iowa college students back to their hometowns so the youngsters could participate in the state's caucuses: A few days later, that same newspaper reported some uncertainty about how many of Sanders' Iowa supporters were actually registered to vote: However, both pieces described the need for Sanders to ensure his Iowa supporters could participate in their hometown caucuses, not a plot to bring students in from outside Iowa to infiltrate the state caucuses and other politics events. We found no reports about the Iowa caucuses that addressed unregistered, out-of-state agitators having taken part in them, nor were we able to locate reports of any similar voter chicanery emerging in any states in which caucuses or primaries had thus far been conducted. Moreover, we found no such reports of organized travel among Sanders supporters on social media, despite the propensity of young people to catalog their exploits on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like. The apparently baseless claim wasn't even unique to presidential campaigning when Hunt presented it to an annoyed Sanders on 28 January 2016 — prior to that, similar rumors had circulated about spates of Black Lives Matter protests across the United States in 2014 and 2015 (again, with no substantive evidence any such collusion was underway). In March 2016, the same tale was repurposed as a narrative thread in the tapestry of rumors regarding protests at Donald Trump rallies. So rife was the belief that paid protesters were disrupting Trump rallies that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski tweeted (and then deleted) a link to a fake news story purporting to support the rumor: Despite the enduring popularity of the rumor, we've never been able to find evidence (of which there should be a few social media traces) that Sanders (or anyone else) engaged students (or anyone else) to travel to sites and disrupt or fraudulently participate in rallies, caucuses, or primaries.
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