Ok let's get one thing straight: Bernie Sanders was my kind of candidate, but if he had really wanted to win in 2016 he would have challenged the primary election results ten ways to Sunday. In Massachusetts, Bill Clinton illegally campaigned inside the polling wire, glad-handing and back-slapping as Secretary of State William J. Galvin looked the other way, merely issuing a "reminder" later to everyone that electioneering inside the wire was illegal.

Later in Massachusetts, it was discovered that Sanders had won by an average of 18% in towns where the paper ballots are counted by hand, but lost by about 1.4% in towns where the ballots were counted by machine. Sanders supporters filed a lawsuit demanding to look at the paper ballots, but a Massachusetts court struck it down on procedural grounds.

In California, election officials in San Diego got caught red-handed using white-out - yes, white-out - on Sanders votes. It doesn't matter what the department gave for a reason. There should never be white-out in a vote-counting room. Never. Not once.

And in Arizona, thousands of voters waited in the hot sun and into the night to vote, in Maricopa County, the state's most populous county, and many quit because they had to go back to work or mind kids. Maricopa County is where Phoenix is.

All of this is summarized in "Yes, Hillary Did Steal the Democratic Primary in 2016."

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Bernie entered the race. But why run if you don't have the belly-fire for the big fight when it starts? Bernie certainly had it early in his career, when he got dragged off by cops as he sat next to a Black woman demonstrating for her civil rights. In those days, Bernie was really "with her" when someone needed to be.

But what about now?

Bernie managed to say some of these episodes of cheating were disgraceful, but that isn't enough when the $27 you just gave him was the last you had that didn't go to bills or food. Announcing that you have "observers" and "legal teams" on stand-by, and ready to rock, is all well and good, but what good are observers if they never do anything with their observations?

Hard-ball politics means going to court in a heartbeat, hold up, do not pass go, just what the hell is going on here, your honor? Bernie had every grounds to ask a Massachusetts judge to invalidate the precincts where old Bill illegally crossed the polling wire, 150 feet from the entrance of the polling station in Massachusetts. He had every grounds to ask a New York judge to hold the primary all over again in Brooklyn, where at least 125,000 voters inexplicably got wiped off the rolls, or had their registrations otherwise f*&ked with.

Old Bernie owes his supporters an explanation. It is not academic. The very same people running the DNC primary election apparatus in 2016 will be running it in 2020. There is absolutely no reason to believe they will behave any better. In fact there is every reason to believe they will behave as badly or worse. In the intervening years, election departments have hidden whatever can be hidden and a lot of things that shouldn't be, by law. In Florida in 2017, Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes flat out burned - destroyed illegally - every last paper ballot affecting a non-Democratic establishment, primary candidate, Tim Canova.

Canova was suing to have his votes counted again, after statisticians spotted some mighty peculiar vote patterns in the voting data, which suggested machine total tampering. Now Canova can never prove election fraud one way or the other, which itself is evidence screaming of guilt for rigging the election for the establishment candidate, Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

Florida state Judge Raag Singhal of the 17th Judicial Circuit Court held that Wasserman-Schultz ally Brenda Snipes - they campaign together - "illegally destroyed" ballots which are required by federal law to be preserved for 22 months after an election. Judge Singhal also said:

"defendant's lack of intent to destroy evidence while this case was pending is irrelevant."

Singhal affirmed that there was no question of fact that Snipes had engaged in a violation of federal statute 52 USC 20701, punishable by up to a year in jail.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, an election department attorney responded to my requests for the ballot images - digital images that are automatically taken of each ballot as it is run though the optical scan counting machine - with stonewalling and prevarication. An Ohio judge clearly ruled that the ballot images were public record, and therefore subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The attitude of the Cuyahoga County election department is, who cares.

Sanders must come clean and come clean fast. People work too hard for their money for him to be thinking he will just influence the dialogue, and not fight to win.

One way for Bernie to start coming clean is to immediately announce his support for nationwide legislation requiring the option of voter hand-marked paper ballots, either hand-counted, or counted by a modern optical scan vote counting machine which takes digital images of the paper ballots. The digital images should posted publicly for recounting as citizen election experts recommend.

Another way for Bernie to come clean would be to join the call by Tim Canova for law enforcement to enforce the law, in the matter of former Broward County election supervisor Brenda Snipes, who was fired by the governor before she could end her term in peace. Snipes now has the gall to contest her firing on the grounds that she is being "singled out" because she is Black, although no one can show that illegally burning ballots is a standard practice, even in Florida.

Bernie Sanders has become the Bernie who told his supporters who wanted him to clog the courts with righteous lawsuits, and demanding re-votes and re-counts where warranted: "Brothers and sisters, this is the real world."

We know that Bernie. And the real world sometimes demands a fight. What Tim Canova is doing, that's what a fight looks like. It is not a question which pertains only to primaries. In the 2016 general election, VoteSleuth.org discovered a strange and highly unlikely "red shift" pattern indicating possible election fraud in favor of Donald Trump, though Ohio's 18 electoral votes would not have reversed the outcome.

We want the old Bernie back. We want the Bernie who got dragged off by the cops when he stood by a Black woman.