The Saint Paul DFL had its City Convention on Saturday.

The usual pack of clowns got the nod…

Incumbent Saint Paul School Board members Anne Carroll and Kazoua Kong-Thao along with newcomers Keith Hardy and Kevin Riach were endorsed by acclimation at today’s Saint Paul DFL city convention.

No opposition was expected and they were the only nominated candidates. Congratulations to all four … the real campaign for St. Paul school begins now. As a united front, they have a great chance of dislodging Republican…

…I presuming they’re talking about Republican Tom Conlon, the sole non-DFL member of the board, the body’s sole source of any form of diversity, and the only sitting Republican office-holder in any city-wide office in Saint Paul. 

We’ll have to come back to that later.

Some parts of the DFL are also gamboling about like jabbering lemurs over Instant Runoff Voting, which was endorsed:

The Saint Paul DFL Party endorsed the Better Ballot Campaign on the 2nd ballot today at the city convention. The Better Ballot Campaign is working to put Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)on the ballot in November. Voters would then choose whether or not to have city municipal elections for Mayor and Council using IRV.

An emailer on a Saint Paul Issues discusssion group, however, noted the irony of the vote:

Excuse me if I am the only person who finds this extremely ironic that
the  advocates for Instant Runoff Voting made it so that it was the only
issue  position that got two chances to reach the 60% needed to be supported by the  party?  Get it?  These are the people who think you should only vote  once in any election cycle and wanted two votes on getting party support! 

All humor aside, it was an interesting look into the way the DFL runs things in Saint Paul in general (I add some emphasis):

The rules allowed the advocates of IRV to make a presentation of  their position lasting fifteen minutes (only those for IRV); then there was a  question and answer period where the answers were given by the advocates of IRV  (one was really funny, someone asked about the concerns that the head of Ramsey  County Elections had raised about IRV and if they would explain them to the  group … the response was, “well everyone is entitled to their
opinion” and on  they went to the next question); during the entire Q and A their was a continual  run of the Pro position being run on the big screen to the group; then after 25  minutes of presenting one side of the issue, both sides got five speakers, one  minute each.  They had made sure that there was no way to discuss all of  the problems that IRV would cause.  You can’t get much across in one minute  and barely can touch on the issue. 

And after all that?

So, with that IRV didn’t reach the 60% needed for endorsement and they
had  to use the extra special second vote that only IRV was allowed and then
they won  by two votes.

Expect the DFL and the Strib (pardon the redundancy) to pull out all the stops to push IRV in Saint Paul and, since this is a DFL campaign, vilify all opponents without restraint.

The Saint Paul DFL Party endorsed the Better Ballot Campaign on the 2nd ballot today at the city convention. The Better Ballot Campaign is working to put Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)on the ballot in November. Voters would then choose whether or not to have city municipal elections for Mayor and Council using IRV. Exact numbers are at the very bottom of the post.

IRV ballot measure missed the 60% endorsement threshold by 2 votes on the first ballot and then won by 2 on the second! Surprisingly, it appears that only 1 delegate left between the first and second ballots. Over here in Minneapolis, we’re used to higher rates of disappearing delegates. I doff my cap to y’all.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 5:21 am and is filed under Democrat Party, St. Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.