DEMOCRATIC ‘BOSSES’ TRIED TO STEAL COUNTY CONVENTION

Again, Nevada Democrats stampeded to participate in the continuing daytime drama of choosing our 2008 national convention delegates via an outdated process that doesn’t relate to regular voters in our party.

The Clark County Democratic Party and its chair, John Hunt, had no intention of playing by the rules, and on Feb. 23 presided over the most disastrous county convention I have witnessed in 30 years of political life.

His unelected, unqualified and handpicked convention chairman, Bill Stanley, is quoted by The Associated Press as doing this deliberately to affect the outcome. It failed, and it has done substantial damage to the good will of our partisan voters supporting both candidates, though both Stanley and Hunt are Hillary Clinton advocates.

They came up with a very clever scheme Richard Daley would have applauded: to steal the Clark County convention. Their own county executive board had no say and no vote on these matters, and they made all of the decisions without benefit of input from party leaders across the state and spectrum of the party. They both, in fact, dismissed the entire party, and did it their own way to spectacular failure.

They both decided to flood the convention floor with “alternate” delegates, rather than giving priority to seating duly elected, actual delegates from the January caucus. Though both statuses have voting rights at the county level, there is a very real and very discernible difference between a delegate and an alternate delegate.

Those able to prove their Jan. 19 appointments were demoted to alternate status and hundreds were denied their status due them under Democratic National Committee protocols we were to have followed.

It was political “bossism” at its very worst and a blatant attempt to steal the Clark County convention. There were signs their plot was failing early on, with the “straw poll” result that showed a near tie and their candidate slipping in Clark; the same trend in the other 16 counties Saturday.

It was a deplorable attempt to stop the migration they knew was coming, away from the candidate they both supported.

Without question, those able to prove their status via their paperwork and our records should have been handled separately and given the very highest priority. We were aware of precincts from Jan. 19 that were never turned in, but that would have affected few delegates and could have been reconciled had the campaigns each had a representative to resolve these disputes and those slots filled by the alternates during registration. The room set aside for verification had a volunteer who was able to pull the white copy of the delegate selection sheet, and I brought more than three dozen to that room to have their status changed back to an actual delegate.

Missing in the registration room were photocopies of the information this man had right across the hall. So what should have been an easily verifiable process turned into a power grab that left several thousand Democrats with no status at all, and duly chosen delegates a second-class status on the floor.

Nice try, but it didn’t work.

Any repeated misconduct, as we witnessed by John Hunt and Bill Stanley, will be met with anarchy and internal civil war should either of these men not include the campaigns and their own executive board in decisionmaking. They have lost the confidence of the entire Democratic electorate in Clark County and should not be in control of the event when we reconvene.

The fiasco at Bally’s was the epitome of what is wrong with caucusing, and why party members need a state-sanctioned primary to eliminate the political meddling, bossism and “fixing” in full display Feb. 23.

Please demand your Nevada representatives pass the primary proposal in 2009 and move all political offices to the third Saturday in January 2012, so we may free our voters from the bondage of the self-appointed “bosses” who almost destroyed the entire local party Saturday.

Mike Zahara is a Las Vegas resident and an at-large delegate to the state Democratic Party’s executive board.