Sunday May 26, 2019
Frederick Melo
St. Paul mayoral candidate Melvin Carter speaks Saturday, June 17, 2017, during the DFL City Convention at the Washington Technology Magnet School. (Frederick Melo / Pioneer Press)
On a Sunday afternoon last month, three hopeful candidates for the St. Paul City Council sat before dozens of voters packed into a high school auditorium and pledged to abide by the will of the crowd.
If they failed to receive the support of the St. Paul City DFL, they said, they would drop out of the Ward 1 race and back the endorsed candidate in the November election.
Within less than an hour, two of the three candidates changed their mind.
When the first ballot results arrived at the April 28 Ward 1 convention, city council member Dai Thao, the incumbent for the area that spans Summit-University, Frogtown and neighboring corners, had 99 votes, falling a few votes shy of reaching the requisite 60 percent of the delegate count needed to clinch the endorsement.
Dai Thao
Liz De La Torre garnered 30 votes. Anika Bowie had 39 votes.
Before a second ballot could be tallied, however, the two first-time candidates took to the stage to ask that their supporters walk out in protest of what they deemed to be voting irregularities — including the fact there were at least a handful more votes than people.
With shouts and cheers erupting on all sides, many participants left the room.
A significant number stayed.
Thao soon won the party endorsement with 74 percent of the vote on the second ballot, and the Ward 1 convention moved onto statements from school board candidates.
Convention co-chair Chuck Repke, who has overseen some 50 to 60 conventions in the past 30 years, said any difficulties distributing ballots were not so different than in decades past when there was a high turnout of recent immigrants, English-language-learners and first-time participants.
“The writing on the wall was clear,” said Mai Chong Xiong, field chair for Thao’s campaign. “Dai was going to get the endorsement. What they were trying to do was break quorum.”
The fallout, however, continues.
On the same night, De La Torre and Bowie issued a joint statement further rejecting the outcome of the Ward 1 convention, saying “the process was not fair, transparent, or equitable. The St. Paul DFL was unable to establish a legitimate process and we could not continue to participate.”
Bowie has since filed a formal complaint with the state party, alleging a dozen instances of “inequity, fraud, dishonesty,” including unethical translators and pre-marked ballots.
“The DFL didn’t really have the capacity to step in if they saw something that was in violation,” said Bowie, in an interview. Many delegates — even some long-standing party activists — didn’t get their credentials in time to participate in the first ballot, she noted.
“My staff had to literally give people their badges,” she said. “People were turned away after members of the credentials committee said their names weren’t on the list. And that was a lie.”
St. Paul City DFL Chair Beth Commers said she was taken aback by the walkout, which could have been avoided a number of ways.
“They could have asked for a new vote, but they didn’t,” Commers said. “They got up there, they said their peace of mind, and they walked out. They did not ask for any solutions. There’s so many things procedurally we could have done. We were so surprised.”
WHY ENDORSE AT ALL?
The decision to walk out after a single ballot even took some unaffiliated political organizers aback, given the wide gulf in votes between Thao and the two candidates, but it’s spurred even more fundamental questions from some party insiders.
Rather than reform an unruly process, why should the St. Paul DFL host caucuses and endorsing conventions for council races at all?
“It is time for this endorsement process to end,” said former St. Paul DFL Chair Libby Kantner, in an open letter following the April 28 Ward 1 convention.
“I ask all St. Paul candidates — those who won the endorsement, and those who did not — to run through the election in November. Bring your message to all of St. Paul,” Kantner said. “The votes of 200-ish people willing and able to take several hours out of their weekend should not speak for a whole ward or a whole city.”
Chaotic caucuses and conventions are hardly unusual, she said. They are part of the reason the state Legislature and then-Gov. Mark Dayton, a DFLer, chose to move to a presidential primary system after busy caucuses in 2016.
“Anyone who has attended caucuses in a presidential year has seen this — overcrowded classrooms with people voting on scraps of paper which could be lost or double-counted,” Kantner said.
It’s a message that resonates with De La Torre, a former campaign field organizer for U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum.
For a council seat, “I don’t think party endorsements mean what they used to,” said De La Torre, who has been involved in politics at the city level since 2012. “You have to tailor your message to a crowd of 200 people, which is not even 10 percent of the vote you need to win an election.”
Bowie said she isn’t ready to scrap party conventions, but they need to be “redefined to be more relevant to today,” she said. “What I appreciate about the convention is that it really gives voters the opportunity to hear more about each candidate in person, and their vision. But we need a more inclusive process that isn’t about crowning and king-making.”
Repke, on the other hand, considers caucuses and conventions essential.
“Ranked-choice voting is the reason you need them more than ever,” he said. “When you don’t have the endorsement process, the only thing that talks is money.”
He added: “Otherwise, everyone just declares they’re the Democrat, even if they’re the Republican. You’ll end up with nine candidates running, and with limited time in the media, the ability to tell the voters that you’re the Democratic candidate makes a difference.”
NONPARTISAN, RANKED-CHOICE ELECTIONS
Kantner and other critics have called the caucus system difficult to schedule and navigate, especially for first-time participants and English language learners.
The Ward 1 caucuses were arguably no less chaotic in 2015, when volunteers were overwhelmed by heavy turnout from East African immigrant voters, and the ward convention that year spanned 11 hours, without result. Thao was eventually endorsed later that summer after two other DFL candidates dropped out of the running.
The 2015 Ward 1 Caucuses in St. Paul (via YouTube):
What’s more, while the city leans heavily DFL, the seven-member St. Paul City Council is officially a nonpartisan body.
Endorsements potentially weed out qualified candidates who don’t identify strongly along party lines and don’t wish to participate in a partisan endorsing process held months in advance of the election.
Perhaps most importantly, at least to Kantner, St. Paul has elected city council members by ranked-choice ballot since 2011, allowing virtually any resident who wishes to pay the filing fee onto the November ballot.
Ranked-choice, which voters approved at the ballot box in 2009, eliminates political primaries in the spirit of offering the public multiple alternatives on Election Day — so why weed out candidates as much as six months in advance? Candidate filings officially open in July.
“We did this so more people could be engaged in a fuller conversation about the future of St. Paul,” Kantner said. “The St. Paul DFL process and the pressure to ‘abide’ by the endorsement … undermines that sentiment.”
Others disagree, noting that caucuses and conventions allow a rare opportunity for everyday voters with the same general political leanings to hash out a party platform face-to-face, rather than leaving the task to a seemingly exclusive group of party leaders.
“I saw a lot of shady stuff Sunday, but no different than the last few conventions,” said Wintana Melekin, a community organizer, sharing her thoughts on social media after the Ward 1 convention. “I don’t think this means we need to abolish conventions, but become more technology based. The power belongs to a group of volunteers with paper sign-in, and if they’re biased the convention can’t function.”
There’s also, however, the question of logistics and the number of available volunteers.
Leading up to the city’s seven ward conventions, Commers — the St. Paul City DFL chair — received multiple complaints about scheduling around Ramadan, Cinco de Mayo, summer break and other events and holidays.
It’s a lot for an all-volunteer party to take on, and Commers acknowledged there’s no way to satisfy everyone. “We did our best,” she said. “But we do so enthusiastically, and we’re up for the challenge. We always strive to do better.”
After declaring his candidacy in Ward 4, Tarrence Robertson-Bayless dropped out of the running, as he would not be back from overseas deployment in time for the party’s ward convention.
In Ward 6, Danielle Swift dropped out of the DFL Party entirely to seek the Green Party endorsement, citing the fairness of convention scheduling as one of her concerns.
TRANSLATORS, DELEGATE CREDENTIALS AT ISSUE
Among De La Torre’s concerns about the Ward 1 Convention, there were at least six more votes cast on the first ballot than there were seated delegates. She said she witnessed two fist fights or physical confrontations — one by the credentials table and another on the convention floor.
She said that translators, provided by the individual campaigns, were not impartial. Her campaign brought her own Somali, Oromo and Hmong translators to verify.
In her complaint to the state party, Bowie said a Somali translator incorrectly told listeners that she had informed the crowd she would turn St. Paul into “a home for people born and raised in St. Paul,” a thinly veiled anti-immigrant threat. Elsewhere, her supporters described a school board candidate handing Somali voters pre-marked ballots for Thao or filling out other people’s ballots.
“That’s a lie,” said Omar Syeed, the school board candidate, in an interview. “I was a delegate. I was filling out my own paperwork.”
Elsewhere in her complaint, Bowie alleges that Thao participated in handing out or collecting ballots, which the council member has denied. He said he became alarmed when he saw that ballots were not being distributed in Precinct 2.
“When I saw that this man wasn’t passing out the ballots, I informed the DFL official that this is what is happening,” said Thao, in an interview. “When they came and saw that, I went back to my precinct.”
The greatest problems, both women said, occurred leading up to the convention, beginning with difficulties getting a list of delegates and alternates.
“That list was never finalized,” said De La Torre, in an interview on Wednesday. “To my knowledge, there was never a credentials report the day of. There was never an opportunity for any campaign to challenge the credentials.”
Repke, the convention chair, said few if any of the issues brought up in Bowie’s complaint were brought to the floor for public discussion during the convention.
In Ward 1, “Precinct 2 and Precinct 5, which sat near each other and both had a significant delegation of new immigrant population (ESL), appeared to have commingled in their seating,” Repke said in a public post on the E-Democracy.org forums. “The process of sorting it out was noisy and had several people volunteering to assist who had not been asked to assist.”
The situation, Repke said, was sorted out “with great effort from the translators and party officers,” but nothing occurred that would make the outcome illegitimate in his eyes.
Most of the ward conventions have resulted in sitting council members winning endorsements on the first ballot, except Ward 6, where there is an open seat and no one broke 60 percent of the vote after five ballots.
During the Ward 7 convention, city council member Jane Prince won endorsement on the first ballot over multiple challengers. Ahmed Hersi, a fellow candidate in Ward 7, said he respected the outcome, despite the difficulties in the weeks after the precinct caucuses getting some of his questions answered by the St. Paul DFL.
“We, Ward 7, had the best convention in the whole city. It was smooth and fair,” Hersi said. “From March 10th up to the convention start time, I didn’t like how things were going.”
The St. Paul City DFL will endorse school board candidates at the city convention, which will be held June 23.
ENDORSEMENT RESULTS FROM ST. PAUL’S SEVEN DFL WARD CONVENTIONS:
Ward 1 — Dai Thao; Ward 2 — Rebecca Noecker; Ward 3 — Chris Tolbert; Ward 4 — Mitra Nelson; Ward 5 — Amy Brendmoen; Ward 6 — no endorsement; Ward 7 — Jane Prince.