DEMS IN DISARRAY!
Party’s virtual meeting dissolves into 13-hour Zoom call from hell
Progressives secure transparency reforms
COURIER LIFE, DECEMBER 25-31, 2020 29
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The Brooklyn Democratic
Party’s fi rst ever virtual full
membership meeting went off
the rails on Dec. 16, with party
bigs miscounting votes and
members pushing them for
more transparency during a
wild 13-hour Zoom call.
“We are the laughing stock
of this entire city,” said Bushwick
Assemblywoman Maritza
Davila toward the latter
half of the meeting. “We
wasted a whole nine hours.”
The inaugural digital gathering
of the borough party —
formally the Kings County
Democratic County Committee
— fell apart after a tabulation
error during a vote on renewing
party rules, which counted
more votes than there are members
in the party in total.
The motion at fi rst passed
by a hair of four votes in favor
to keep the rules, something
favored by party leadership —
but the president of the reformoriented
club New Kings Democrats,
Mariana Alexander, soon
pointed out that the total count
of 2,205 was 26 votes north of
the actual membership of 2,179.
Some 150 people attended
the virtual meeting, but, as
with in-person meetings in the
past, Democrats could hand
over their votes to other members
to cast ballots on issues on
their behalf in a controversial
system known as proxy-voting,
allowing some politicos to
wield hundreds of votes apiece.
Irregularities emerged even
before the vote, such as when
Alexander noted that Manhattan
Beach District Leader Ari
Kagan seemed to have almost
80 proxies — more than twice
the amount of proxy votes
available in his district.
The overcount apparently
stemmed from the vote tabulator
wrongly drawing on data
from Dec. 2, which still included
illegally-fi lled county
committee seats a Brooklyn
Supreme Court judge voided a
week later because the 2,400 appointments
across the borough
violated state Election Law.
Several reformers started
pressing the meeting’s leader,
party chair Carlo Scissura, to
halt any further vote until the
miscount was remedied.
The contested vote — put
forth by Marine Park District
Leader Lori Maslow — was to
renew the party’s rules, something
that garnered its own
controversy when reformers
said that County was forcing
through the status quo without
giving members a chance
to vote on an alternative set of
rules proposed by NKD.
The party leadership originally
didn’t want to hold a
full meeting amid COVID-19,
claiming older members
would struggle to access the
virtual technology, but they
were ordered to do so by a
Kings County Supreme Court
judge in October, after reformers
sued the party.
After midnight, Scissura
along with party boss Assemblywoman
Rodneyse Bichotte
admitted that the meeting
wasn’t going as planned and
that they would rescind the
earlier vote and reconvene at
a date in the near future with
more structures in place and a
more thorough count of votes.
“Unfortunately it saddened
me to have experience and to
have all of you experience this
unfortunate process, and I
agree with you,” said Bichotte.
“We apologize. I want to get
this right and we must get this
right. And you know what, we
will, we will, because this is
not the vision that we had.”
But dozens demanded party
leaders produce raw data of
the vote by their Canadian
voting tech contractor Data
on the Spot, believing that it
likely would not have passed
if counted correctly and alleging
that the party was trying
to forestall any further votes
now that bigwigs knew progressives
had the numbers.
“We could have tabulated
these votes on an abacus faster
than we’ve done this evening and
so it just feels to me like there’s
been a deliberate set of stall tactics,”
said Carroll Gardens District
Leader Josh Skaller.
Scissura refused to do so
for hours, saying it wasn’t possible
to show the raw fi gures
that same night, but pressure
mounted with progressives refusing
to adjourn the meeting
until the data was released.
He eventually relented, before
holding another break to let
people analyze the fi gures.
When leaders reconvened,
Scissura gave the fl oor to Alexander,
who brought forth a
new motion to adopt the alternative
county committee rules
proposed by her and fellow reformers,
to reconvene a meeting
on Dec. 23, and to recess.
That motion passed easily
with 110 out of 146 votes.
The next day, the party issued
an unsigned “open letter”
to committee members,
in which is apologized for the
messy meeting and pinned the
tally error, preliminarily and
partly, on the way meeting attendance
was clocked.
Looking to Dec. 23, the
group vowed to work with organizers
— including NKD —
“to assess what went wrong.”
“When it does, we will
make sure our chat function
is open; we will agree on a parliamentarian;
and we will use
a neutral third party to tabulate
the votes,” the group said
Days ahead of the second
meeting on Dec. 23, Scissura
resigned from his ceremonial
position and party leaders
elected outgoing Bedford-
Stuyvesant Assemblywoman
Tremaine Wright to take the
helm during a closed-door
meeting.
Reformers hold up signs at a 2017 Kings County Democratic County Committee
meeting. File photo by Julianne Cuba
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Progressives secured a
big victory over the Brooklyn
Democratic Party leadership
at a 13-hour Zoom meeting on
Dec. 16, passing a slate of new
rules aimed at making the borough’s
party more democratic
and transparent.
One freshman pol hailed
the move as the result of more
than a decade of organizing by
progressive clubs like the New
Kings Democrats to reform
the Kings County Democratic
County Committee’s Byzantine
laws and power structures, and
bring more ordinary Brooklynites
into the fold.
“This is a huge milestone
for 12 years of organizing for
New Kings Democrats and Rep
Your Block,” said Boerum Hill
District Leader Jesse Pierce.
“The engagement we’re seeing
from County Committee members
from across the borough
— there are just so many people
that get a piece of this success.”
NKD’s president Mariana
Alexander put forth the set of
rules at the end of the party’s
chaotic virtual meeting, after
hours spent tabulating votes
and alleged efforts by leaders
to keep the existing rules.
The motion, which included
scheduling a new meeting for
Dec. 23, passed handily.
The new regulations will, for
the fi rst time, limit the amount
of votes County Committee
members can collect and wield
on behalf of others — a controversial
system known as proxyvoting,
whereby Democrats
can give up their vote and have
other members vote on their at
annual party meetings.
Previously, the system enabled
party honchos to amass
hundreds of votes and use
them to overcome reformers
pushing for change. Now, each
Dem can hold no more than 20
votes from other people, leveling
the playing fi eld, according
to Alexander. “It’s like reform
101,” she said.
The rules also establish
stricter oversight of the party’s
troubled fi nances, which
dwindled during the eightyear
tenure of prior party boss
Frank Seddio, who attributed
the loss of fi nances to their denial
of contributions from the
real estate industry.
To ensure more fi nancial
accountability, the rules now
require an annual budget to
be approved by the party’s executive
committee, a 42-member
body consisting of the borough
district leaders and a
handful of elected offi cers.
A separate fi nance committee
must ensure compliance
with that budget and keep an
accurate account of cash fl ow
in-and-out of the party, while
providing information online.
“For there to be forced clear
accountability for what money
the party is getting and spending
is huge,” Pierce said.
The party leaders initially
argued they couldn’t hold
any meetings at all due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, but a Kings
County Supreme Court Judge in
October ordered them to in accordance
with state election law.
The new rules also re-establish
that second annual meeting.