A Democratic National Committee subcommittee on Monday recommended that the organization invalidate one of its February vice-chair votes over claims that it unfairly disadvantaged female candidates.
The move, which won’t be official unless the entire DNC votes to approve it, could open up new races for the positions held by David Hogg, a Florida activist, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a Pennsylvania state legislator.
The challenge by Oklahoma Democratic Committeewoman Kalyn Free, who unsuccessfully ran against Hogg and Kenyatta in the February race for vice chair, is not related to the ongoing tension between Hogg and the national party over his push to support primary challenges against incumbent Democrats.
Instead, it was based off Free’s claim that the handling of the vice-chair vote gave the two men an unfair advantage amid the national party’s requirements that its executive committee achieve gender balance.
I don’t think the challenge is bullshit, but it’s also not clear that the result was definitely impacted or in any way planned. Seems like a situation of “whoops, let’s be more careful in the future” (the position held by Christine Pelosi of all people) rather than inviting a party schism by using this to try to eject Hogg. Because there will definitely be people lobbying voters to explicitly do that.
Let’s go ahead and call bullshit. I’m going to guess the vote “unfairly” disadvantaged female candidates in the same way anyone who disagrees with Israel killing 100,000 Palestinians is antisemitic.
There were two positions remaining, and one of them had to be male. From the description, I think everyone had 2 votes and one had to be for a man, so if votes were split evenly and no one voted for both men, the men would each get 50% and the three women would get 33%. A real vote isn’t going to be perfectly split, but it puts the neutral expectation for the male candidates much higher than the women. If the men went head to head and then there was a separate vote with the second place and the women, there wouldn’t be the same bias.