Panel Rejects DeLauro Challenger’s Convention Complaint

by Thomas Breen

A state Democratic Party panel has declined to order a redo of U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s endorsement vote — after finding that the “flaws” that occurred during a recent convention likely would not have changed the convention’s outcome.

A three-person panel of Democratic State Central Committee members handed down that decision Monday evening in response to a complaint filed by Andrew Rice, a 37-year-old democratic socialist from Milford who is mounting a longshot challenge to DeLauro, an 83-year-old incumbent seeking a 19th two-year term in office.

“After carefully reviewing the testimony, documentary evidence, affidavits, and arguments presented by the parties,” Monday’s decision reads, “the Panel concludes that, although certain procedural flaws occurred during the convention, the evidence presented does not establish that the outcome of the convention was placed in serious doubt.”

Click here to read the decision in full.

Rice’s complaint focused on the Third Congressional District endorsement convention held in West Haven on May 11. At that party-insiders meetup, DeLauro — the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee — won 294 delegate votes to Rice’s 45. That left Rice just six votes shy of crossing the 15 percent threshold needed to qualify for the Aug. 11 Democratic primary ballot. He now needs to gather roughly 4,000 signatures from registered Democrats in the district by June 9 if he wants to keep his Democratic-primary challenge alive.

Rice and local civil-rights attorney Alex Taubes subsequently filed a complaint alleging that the state Democratic Party broke a number of its own rules in how convention chair Vinnie Mauro — who is also the chair of the New Haven Democratic Town Committee — ran the May 11 endorsement convention.

During a May 28 online hearing, Rice and Taubes focused their concerns on Mauro not following several of the proposed rules distributed to delegates in advance of the convention, including one that required the chair to allow for a 10-minute period for delegates to change their votes after the initial casting of ballots.

Rice and Taubes argued that Rice would have been able to convince at least six delegates to switch from backing DeLauro after they saw how close he was to qualifying for the primary ballot. They presented as part of their complaint two attestations from delegates who said they would have done exactly that.

As a remedy, Rice and Taubes asked the state party to either redo the convention or place Rice directly on the primary ballot.

During that same May 28 complaint hearing, Mauro conceded that he did not provide a 10-minute period for vote changing, as the convention’s proposed rules required. He also said that he simply forgot to put the proposed rules up for a vote. He said that he was in part distracted by people hurling “vulgarities” at him during the convention, and he stressed that there was “nothing nefarious” in how he ran the meeting.

State Democratic Party Legal Counsel Kevin Reynolds and various panel members emphasized during the complaint hearing that, because Mauro never officially called for the adoption of the convention’s proposed rules, those rules were not technically in effect. Instead, by default, Robert’s Rules were in effect, and Robert’s Rules do not necessarily require a 10-minute period for vote changing.

As explained in Monday’s decision, a three-person Democratic Party panel — consisting of Sharon Mounds of Rocky Hill, Thomas Gaudett of Bridgeport, and Nicholas Vegilante of Preston — ultimately found that the convention should not be redone and Rice’s name should not be automatically place on the primary ballot.

They acknowledged in their decision that Rice “raised legitimate procedural flaws” with how the May 11 convention was run.

“The Democratic Party has a fundamental obligation to ensure that its nominating process is conducted fairly, transparently, and in accordance with its rules,” they wrote. “Delegates, candidates, and party members alike are entitled to have confidence that the procedures governing the selection of nominees will be followed.”

And yet, the panel continued, “the Committee must be mindful that conventions exist for the purpose of expressing the will of the delegates assembled on a particular day and under a particular set of circumstances.”

The panel’s decision points to a 1999 state Supreme Court decision in the case Bortner v. Woodbridge that emphasizes that, while courts can overturn election results, the “ordering of a new and different election in effect disfranchises all of those who voted at the first election because their validly cast votes no longer count, and the second election can never duplicate the complex combination of conditions under which they cast their ballots.”

The same logic holds true for undoing convention votes, they said.

The panel proved wary of taking such an extraordinary step in light of the “flaws” pointed out by Rice.

“The existence of a procedural error does not, by itself, require that the result of a convention be set aside,” the panel wrote. “To hold otherwise would invite endless uncertainty into the nominating process and would risk nullifying the collective judgment of the delegates who participated in good faith.”

What about Mauro’s failure to allow for a 10-minute period for delegates to change their votes?

The panel was ultimately unconvinced by Rice’s charge that a key rule was broken and that he lost out on a meaningful chance to cross that 15 percent threshold.

“As a matter of custom, political conventions allow for a period for delegates to change their votes,” the decision reads. “Until the vote is announced as final, a delegate has the unilateral authority to change their vote. If a delegate were denied the opportunity to change their vote, that would be improper. Neither Article III, nor Robert’s Rules addresses whether a period of time to change delegate votes must be announced. The Convention Chair did not close the vote until the tallying was completed. Any delegate could have changed their vote prior to this time.”

In the decision’s conclusion, the panel confirms that they do indeed have the power to overturn a convention’s results — even though they decided here not to exercise that authority.

They wrote that, “like with overturning the result of an election, in the adjudication of any rules violations or other issues at a nominating convention, the Panel should only overturn the result of said convention if there is sufficient evidence presented to show that the result of the convention is in doubt.

“The Panel unanimously agrees that the Complainant failed to meet its burden of showing that Mr. Rice would have received 15% of the votes cast but for these errors and flaws. Accordingly, the complaint is dismissed.”

In a Tuesday morning email press release, Rice said that the panel’s decision was “disappointing but not shocking … The Party’s contempt for democracy is stunning and further shows why people have been abandoning it in droves.”

In a separate email press release Monday, Taubes slammed the panel’s decision as unduly influenced by a bias towards incumbents. “A party that will bend its own rules to protect an incumbent has shown us exactly who it is — and we fully expect it to find the next excuse, and the next, to keep Andrew Rice off the ballot,” Taubes wrote. “They would rather run unopposed than let their candidate be tested in a fair primary. They would rather deny the people of the Third District a choice than trust the people to make one.”