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A busted ballot and 11th hour rule changes: The Minneapolis DFL Convention was a train wreck • Minnesota Reformer [1]
['Will Stancil', 'David Brauer', 'J. Patrick Coolican', 'Joshua Spivak', 'More From Author', 'July', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']
Date: 2025-07-25
Editor’s note: Retired journalist and DFL activist David Brauer offered a different take on the convention in Thursday’s Reformer. You can read it here.
Delegates at the Minneapolis DFL endorsing convention last weekend sat for over 10 hours accomplishing almost nothing. A single ballot taken for the mayor’s race failed, with an incomplete vote count.
Then, at 9:15 p.m., after hundreds had filtered out, the convention instituted a literal eleventh-hour rule change. Fifteen minutes later, the body had endorsed an entire slate of mayoral and Park & Recreation Board candidates for the first time in decades, including Sen. Omar Fateh for mayor.
To Fateh’s voters in the room, it was a triumph. To many outsiders, it looked like a train wreck.
Is this really how Minneapolis Democrats want to choose their leaders?
The DFL endorsement process, where delegates meet to determine which candidates get the party’s support, has always walked a delicate balance. The party faithful want a say in their own representation, but it’s also troubling to have a few hundred people potentially determine who wins elections in a city made up of hundreds of thousands.
One of the ways we can maintain legitimacy is through regular, predictable process. DFL conventions are notorious for their slow votes, rules debates and careful monitoring and disputes over delegate credentials. Those components are often miserable for attendees — but they maintain a sense of fair play.
Any semblance of normality and regularity at the DFL convention first wobbled, then collapsed completely.
A novel electronic voting system was deployed the day of the convention. It malfunctioned, leading to doubts over whether all votes were being recorded.
Bear with me as I walk through the flaws in the delegate math: There were 800 available delegate seats at Saturday’s convention, but only 579 votes were recorded on the first ballot. Typically, nearly every delegate votes on every ballot.
Unfortunately, no one knows for certain how many of those 800 delegates were present, and the credentials report contained obvious mathematical errors and impossible figures. But the organizers did report a “ballot pool” prior to the first vote — the number of delegates and alternates combined. It was 1,031. This implies that if almost every delegate voted as per usual, there were about 580 delegates, 450 alternates, and 220 empty delegate seats. This arrangement is mathematically implausible — there were clearly plenty of alternates to fill those 220 empty seats.
The more likely scenario is that the number of seated delegates and upgraded alternates was somewhere closer to 750 or 780, and several hundred votes were lost in transmission.
The voting system was supposed to provide a confirmation of votes received, but hundreds of attendees reported receiving none. (I only received a confirmation after four attempts to vote.)
Initially, only Mayor Jacob Frey’s campaign vocally objected to this busted ballot. But there has been further recognition of the problem in the days since. Candidate DeWayne Davis failed to meet the 20% viability cutoff by a single vote and was dropped from contention; this week, he released a statement arguing that many votes had been lost, while pointing out other irregularities. Davis asserted that, absent these errors, he may well have survived to later balloting rounds. The ballot error was immediately obvious on the floor, with many delegates gasping in shock at the low total of votes. But ultimately, redoing the first ballot required a two-thirds vote of the assembled delegates, and Frey opponents had enough votes to block any kind of redo. So the convention went on, warped by this serious error.
Making matters worse, the convention organizers announced that the chief teller — responsible for the entire electronic voting system — experienced a medical emergency and left the convention. They reported that as she had departed, she’d recommended a shift to traditional paper balloting for subsequent votes. This announcement amplified confusion and frustration among the assembled delegates.
As the convention ticked towards its 10 p.m. stop time, tension grew. A majority of the room had voted against Frey, but split between multiple candidates. For many left-wing attendees, the possibility of consolidating those votes against the mayor was tantalizingly in reach — but time was very short, and park board elections sat in the way.
The convention began to race through high-stakes procedural votes quickly, resolving those votes by a show of badges, instead of an actual count.
After multiple changes to the balloting process — including a briefly adopted plan to utilize paper ballots — Minneapolis Councilmember Aisha Chughtai moved to implement a sweeping rewrite of the rules at approximately 9:10 p.m. This would cram the seven park board races and mayoral race under consideration into a single voting period, to be mostly resolved by a show of hands. This restructuring of the process was passed in a brief 30 second vote, less time than it took to even recite the changes to the audience.
Rule changes like the one proposed by Chughtai can be blocked by 33.3% of delegates; in the day’s single counted ballot, the mayor had secured 31.5%. As best as anyone could tell, even a handful of non-Frey voters preferring no endorsement would be sufficient to prevent this change. Nonetheless, no full count was ever conducted.
At this point many delegates began to leave, having lost faith in the process. At 9:16 p.m. Frey’s team instructed his delegates to vacate the convention, in a last-ditch effort to break quorum. But business continued in their absence, and only minutes later the left-most candidate was endorsed — virtually by acclamation — in every race.
Arguably the park board candidates got the worst of it.
Each park board race was being considered by a separate set of delegates. But the sweeping Chughtai motion changed the rules for every race at once, so that delegates for Districts 1 through 5 were rewriting the rules for District 6, and so forth. It is a truism of the DFL convention process that delegates control the rules of their convention, but in the park board races, that principle was ignored. It is far from clear that a quorum even existed for each of these park votes.
In the end, after a dozen hours and dozens of votes, only two fully-counted votes ever occurred: the initial, dubious mayoral ballot, and a final paper ballot for at-large park board seats. Everything else was resolved in uncounted voice and badge votes. In those votes, convention organizers roughly eyeballed the room and decided whether the threshold (often 60% or 66%) had been met.
Beyond potential procedural objections, there’s a deeper problem: How can anyone trust or care about endorsements selected in this process?
I walked in Saturday hoping for no mayoral endorsement, so the city’s voters could decide in November — but I was happy to accept any normal result. But nothing that day felt normal. The result only shows which subset of several hundred Minneapolitans was able to sit in their seats for 11 hours and then careen through last-minute rule changes invented on the fly.
What does the outcome even represent? It’s hard to say. A certain degree of procedural chicanery takes place in every endorsing convention. But push things too far, and results start to feel random, pointless and unfair.
On Saturday, the winning campaign surely knew there was a problem with the vote count, but refused to fix the problem, because it redounded to their benefit. Is that really how the Minneapolis DFL wants to pick its first mayoral endorsee in decades?
Speaking personally, this is not how I want my city’s leaders chosen. If the DFL wants voters to take it seriously, it needs to ensure conventions don’t devolve into high-stakes gamesmanship for insiders.
Ideally, even losing candidates should leave feeling like they got a fair shake, not that they got cheated. Irregularity, by contrast, breeds illegitimacy.
And if our convention process can’t produce legitimate results, maybe the DFL should abolish it altogether.
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