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.
Nevertheless, the Monday evening vote by the DNC Credentials Committee sets up a high-profile decision for the national party in the coming weeks as it will now be up to the full body to vote on whether to call for a new election for the vice-chair positions held by Hogg and Kenyatta.
This is all happening as DNC Chairman Ken Martin has been separately pushing a reform that would “require all party officers — including myself — to remain neutral in primaries” as Hogg has been signaling he’s planning to take sides.
DNC rules require that the national party’s executive committee “shall be as equally divided as practicable” along gender lines. (If the committee includes members who identify as non-binary, they don’t count for the purposes of gender division.) As DNC members met earlier this year for the multi-hour process of voting in a new slate of officers, the vote for the three vice chairs being the last position to be filled, it became clear that the party needed to elect at least one man to the final two vice chair spots to maintain the required gender equity on the seven-person executive committee.
The party then decided to hold a single vote to decide the final two slots instead of holding separate votes for each position.
Free claimed that the combined ballot unfairly benefited Hogg and Kenyatta, the only two men left in the race, because members had to vote for at least one man on the combined ballot. She argued it’s possible they could have voted differently if the ballots were separated.
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Representatives for Hogg and Kenyatta disagreed with the challenge, arguing that the party was well within its discretionary right to make a move to shorten the lengthy voting process in real time.
The challenge to the DNC election dates from late February, well before the disagreement between Hogg and the party went public. But now, the 400-plus member DNC will have to vote on whether to call for a new election that could cost Hogg his position against this backdrop.
In a statement Monday night, Hogg noted that the issue was over how the national party handled the election, not any accusation he nor Kenyatta did anything wrong. And he added that “it is also impossible to ignore the broader context of my work to reform the party which loomed large over this vote.”
“I ran to be DNC Vice Chair to help make the Democratic Party better, not to defend an indefensible status quo that has caused voters in almost every demographic group to move away from us,” he said, adding that he views the vote as a way for the party to “fast-track” an attempt to remove him from his position.
Kenyatta posted on social media that he while he respected the vote, he disagreed with the committee’s decision, calling it a “slap in my face.”
He also weighed in on the characterization by some who see the vote as the latest in the saga between Hogg and the party.
“I worked my a– off to get this role and have done the job every day since I’ve held it,” he said in a long thread on X. “This story is complex and I’m frustrated—but it’s not about [David Hogg]. Even though he clearly wants it to be.”
Martin, in a statement of his own issued after the vote, framed the debate as strictly about a failure of parliamentary procedure and one he’s looking to party members to decide.
“During my campaign for Chair, I pledged to run the DNC with integrity, openness, and fairness. I am disappointed to learn that before I became Chair, there was a procedural error in the February Vice Chair elections,” he said.
“The Credentials Committee has issued their recommendation, and I trust that the DNC Members will carefully review the Committee’s resolution and resolve this matter fairly,” he added.
The decision came after a three-hour virtual meeting, livestreamed on the party’s YouTube page, that stretched even longer because the 18-member committee tied on its first ballot, which triggered another round of debate. The committee membership has been held over from the appointments by the previous national party chairman, Jaime Harrison, not new appointees by the new chairman.
Eventually, the side that supported the recommendation for a new election won over key opponents, and approved a resolution with the support of 13 members declaring the election to the vice chair seats held by Hogg and Kenyatta “incomplete.” It recommends the DNC hold new elections for both seats “as soon as practicable,” with only the candidates eligible at the party’s final ballot. Hogg and Kenyatta would be allowed to run again, but it’s not a given they’d win the seats.
Mark Mallory, a credentials committee member and former mayor of Cincinnati, said during the meeting that he supported the decision because while “our former chairman did not do anything to intentionally disenfranchise any of the candidates running for vice-chair. However, the result has been just that.”
Mallory compared the process to when a patient with a broken leg has to go get the bone reset at the hospital.
“That process is painful too, but it is a part of the recovery of the initial incident,” he said. “We have, I believe, a responsibility to act.”
