Thread by @whstancil

There were two fundamental problems with the Minneapolis city convention yesterday. First, you had a lot of technical and procedural issues that led to the convention doing essentially no business for the first eleven hours and fifteen minutes, except one confusing ballot.

That ballot was a mess because many people could not tell whether or not their vote counted and received no confirmation of having voted, and despite being an electronic ballot, took hours to resolve and announce.

The results of that ballot suggested that an endorsement was possible but by no means inevitable, and certainly didn’t suggest a huge 2/3s majority for any candidate, which is what would be necessary to throw the rules out and race forward.

But after 11 hours and 15 minutes of nothing happening, at 9:15 PM, and with seven votes left on the agenda, suddenly the convention DID start racing forward, because a majority (of unclear size) seemed to see an opportunity to secure a non-Frey endorsement.

The problem with this is that actually going through the normal process of explaining these big rule shifts, counting the votes for them, etc, would use most of the allotted time… so it just didn’t happen. Everyone was just thrown up and then voted on more or less by voice.

These are tough votes to win that require 2/3s majorities, and it was FAR from clear they should pass. But not once in the entire process was there an actual count. The apparent urgency to endorse overrode that step.

The result of this is that basically all the normal voting rules were scrapped in the final minutes.

Because there was no time or willingness to think through what was happening, there’s technicalities that got overlooked (e.g., no one really knows if there was quorum for the parks elections; it’s unclear to me whether the full convention can change the rules for them anyway).

But all this procedural chaos leads to the second and bigger issue, which is that the convention, after basically stalling until late in the evening, suddenly conducted all of its business virtually by acclamation from 9:15 to 10:00 PM.

That’s bizarre and just feels fundamentally illegitimate. There was zero time for usual convention dynamics to play out, to communicate with delegates, or, again, to actually count votes.

I’m a convention semi-defender sometimes, but the usual complaint is that it’s a couple hundred people seizing control of the process for the whole city depending on who can be there. Last night turned that up to the umpteenth degree.

You had a couple hundred people - we don’t know how many, because nothing was being counted - who just took over the endorsement process for a bunch of races, in 30 minutes, and jammed them through at 9:15 PM on a Saturday. Hard to imagine a process that feels less democratic.