State DFL rules committee wades into Minneapolis mayoral convention fight

The vote tallies didn’t seem to add up, the ballots were missing needed language, and a woman who had been the subject of numerous complaints for allegedly skirting political rules somehow was placed in charge of counting the vote.

The things that took place during the Minneapolis DFL’s mayoral convention last month spurred 98 people to sign onto numerous challenges, an extraordinary level of protest for a Minnesota convention, according to a DFL party official who will be among those to formally hear the challenges at a meeting Sunday.

“Let me put it this way: It’s very, very unusual to have anywhere near that number of challenges arising out of a convention,” said Tim O’Brien, a co-chair of the state DFL’s Constitution, Bylaws, and Rules Committee.

When the 28-member committee convenes Sunday at 10 a.m., they’ll consider a variety of complaints about the July 19 convention held at Target Center that made national news when it handed the Minneapolis DFL endorsement for mayor to state Sen. Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist.

Mayor Jacob Frey, who is running for a third term, placed second in the convention‘s first ballot with 182 votes to Fateh’s 253, and then challenged the results when his campaign pointed to what they consider an obvious problem: The vote totals seemed far too low considering the number of delegates and alternates on hand.

Some of the other challenges pointed to ballots that initially omitted a “no endorsement” option mandated by the DFL’s constitution, delegates who didn’t receive an email verifying that their vote had been counted, alternates who didn’t know if they had been upgraded to delegate status or not, and a raise-your-hands-style vote near the end of the night that some people said violated a lengthy list of DFL rules.

In a response, the Minneapolis DFL leadership said the convention’s results were legitimate. “Disagreement and procedural disputes are natural in any large, contested convention,” the response read, “but they are not grounds to disregard the expressed will of the body.”

The Minneapolis DFL also admitted that mayoral candidate DeWayne Davis was bumped out of contention by mistake after the first ballot when he actually had enough votes to survive to the second round of voting. They found the discrepancy when re-tabulating the vote. Fateh’s total rose as well to 328 and Frey’s to 227. It didn’t change the outcome of the convention, the Minneapolis DFL argued.

The cascading series of controversies began with the apparent breakdown of an electronic balloting system overseen by party official Amy Livingston, who as ‘head teller’ was the party’s supervisor of the voting process.

An IT project manager, Livingston allegedly ran afoul of party rules so often in recent years that nine people who had had problems with her filed an omnibus complaint in late 2023.

The complaint, which was reviewed by the Star Tribune, portrays Livingston as someone who misuses her authority. It was heard by the state party’s Code of Conduct committee in June of last year, but Livingston resigned from her DFL positions immediately afterward. The resignation effectively short-circuited the case and the complaint was dismissed.

At the convention, confusion broke out as the electronic balloting system bogged down. It took nearly two hours for results from the first ballot. Livingston experienced a medical emergency and had to leave, the party explained in its response.

“The data generated by Amy Livingston’s original spreadsheet was obviously faulty,” she wrote.

Goloboy, when contacted by the Minnesota Star Tribune, declined further comment.

Livingston also declined to comment about her history with the DFL or her role as head teller.

Asked why the Minneapolis DFL created a balloting system using documents from the website Jotform.com rather than something more standard like ElectionBuddy, the app used successfully by the state DFL in the past, Maraist said the technology was too expensive.

“I haven’t had anyone relate to me the content of any challenge in any way that makes me think the convention might be overturned,” he said.

“Never in my life have I witnessed a convention that was as out of control,” Erlandson said in an interview. “The outcome is clearly invalid. It’s not about the individual that won. This process failed any sense of democracy.”

Erlandson said he and others who filed challenges were able to read each other’s challenges on a Google Drive set up by the rules committee. Erlandson said a number of them pointed to the same problem Frey’s people had: The votes didn’t add up. Some 1,031 delegates and alternates were sworn in, according to a credentials report, but only 578 votes were counted in the first ballot for mayor.

Other challenges allege that:

Fateh’s campaign said they stand by the results. The state senator won the endorsement in an overwhelming visual vote of delegates holding up their badges.

“The reality is Frey didn’t have the numbers that day to win, a clear sign DFLers are ready to move on from an unpopular incumbent,” Fateh’s campaign said in a statement. “They are sick and tired of broken promises and endless vetoes, and are ready for new leadership in the mayor’s office.”

The party acknowledged that credentialing the more than 1,000 delegates and alternates was slow and caused lengthy delays as volunteers struggled to keep up, but the delays didn’t change the convention’s outcome, they argued. Other challenges over the convention official’s responses, balloting by raised badge, and the presence of a quorum during the final votes also were dismissed by the party, which argued that the convention ran by established DFL rules.