(Remember dday! – promoted by blogswarm)
Ok, so I know this has been leaked, but I figure it’s time to put up a diary on this: I am now a delegate from my Assembly District to the California Democratic Party!! I’m pleased that so many of us, including dday and Rebelatheart, have also won–any other victorious bloggers, please feel free to chime in!
I’m sorry that I’m so late in posting this diary, but the official results were only tallied at around 8:00PST, for reasons I’ll explain below, and I was involved in supervising one of the necessary recounts.
Thank you so much to everyone that voted and helped spread the word–you were all phenomenal, and without you, I don’t think I would have won. The margin wasn’t very large.
dday was there and took video, and the embed is below the fold.
First of all, the results:
We had a very large turnout for the election, with 214 ballots cast. This dwarfs turnout for previous years in our Assembly District, and is a testament to how many more people are getting active in the party. I received votes on 97 of those 214 ballots, for a total of 3rd place among the 24 male candidates.
If you read dday’s diary on his victory, you know that there are two competing slates. Both dday and I were campaigning on the Progressive Slate, and like in his district, my slate swept, with all six men and all five women running on our slate taking delegate positions–though it was far closer in the 42nd than it was in the 41st.
Before I begin and describe the proceedings, I need to give a personal round of thanks to dday. He got me involved and interested in running in the first place, and he also recommended that I join the progressive slate, rather than campaign on my own–in which case I would have had no chance whatsoever. I’m looking forward to working with him and all my fellow victorious bloggers.
The meeting itself was kind of a madhouse–most of the people showed up early, voted and left, which they were completely entitled to do by CDP bylaws. So even though we all went up and gave speeches before however many people cared enough to either stay and listen–or to actually allow their votes to be influenced by candidate statements–the vast majority of the ballots had already been cast by the time I went up to speak. Here’s the video of my speech:
As you can see, I rushed it a little bit because I kind of bit off more than I could chew in the 1-minute timeframe that I had. And yes, that orange shirt is an intentional reference to DailyKos and the community here that came out to support me!
There was a little feuding between our slate, and the members of the opposing slate–many of whom are fine progressives with whom I have absolutely no issues whatsoever, so it’s a little disappointing that we all had to run against each other. But for the most part, everything was civil–with the exception of a little spat about the Executive Board election. I won’t get into the details of that, but suffice it to say that one of the members of our slate was running for Executive Board in the 42nd, and most of the opposing slate supported the incumbent, and that’s where most of the division was.
The Presiding Officer of the meeting was John Heaner, the local party official from our Assembly District–if you watch the YouTube video of my speech, John is on the right in the suit with the red tie. The Presiding Officer is in charge of running the meeting, timing candidate speeches, and supervising the vote count. John did an admirable job in each of these respects, despite a fair amount of drama.
Our meeting officially began at 2, though balloting ended early, and the speeches began at 3. After that, any remaining ballots were collected and the counting procedure began. But there was a major complication–and one of the things I intend to do as a delegate is push for reform of these election procedures. A minor issue, but an important one for the Democratic process.
You see, in addition to being able to cast ballots for delegates before the speeches and proceedings have begun, voters can also cast ballots for the Executive Board position before the proceedings. The problem is that anyone who wins election as a delegate is eligible to nominate themselves for e-board. But because voting on e-board is allowed before the delegate candidates have been certified, the appointed delegates running for e-board have an unfair advantage over the candidates that can only nominate themselves after they win their election. I even received a couple of votes for e-board, though they were invalid because I didn’t nominate myself for the position. So one of the things I intend to do is change the CDP bylaws to only allow votes to be cast for Executive Board once all nominations have been closed.
So anyways. As dday wrote in his diary, CDP bylaws require that all ballots be counted twice. Needless to say, this takes an awfully long time. It was already 5:40 by the time the first count was announced and nominations for e-board could be accepted, and we had to be out of the meeting room by 6! So John Heaner drafted two more counting teams for the delegate ballots, and quickly rushed through the e-board speech and nomination process, and the 20 or so die-hards that wanted to see the process through to the end walked a few blocks to a nearby Coffee Bean to finish our Party business!
At the Coffee Bean, I was selected by John to help oversee the counting of ballots for the Executive Board candidates, while others were chosen to help complete the second count of all the 214 delegate ballots. While the vote for the Executive Board went without a hitch (Susie Shannon won), and the second count there was a mere formality for certification, the second count of the delegate ballots produced a completely different story!
You see, the male delegate who got the sixth most votes––Ricco Ross, a member of our slate–only got two more votes in the first count than the two candidates who were tied for seventh. But the second count showed him trailing by eight! So John, I and several others conducted a recount of the ballots of the three candidates in question. The hand recount, affirmed as valid by all the participants in true Roberts Rules of Order fashion, affirmed that Ricco won by two votes–but with different vote totals than the first recount showed.
That concluded the final piece of business that John had to do to certify our election as delegate, and at around 8:05pm tonight, I officially became a delegate to the Democratic Party from my district! And then I went home and wrote this diary 🙂