The St. Paul DFL endorsed three candidates for school board on Sunday after multiple ballots, but not without giving a City Council member an old-fashioned talking-to and an unofficial benching following accusations he had spread misinformation.
As the eight candidates and their campaign workers pressed delegates for their support, party leaders took aside St. Paul City Council Member Dai Thao and encouraged him to avoid further contact with delegates and take a seat where they could keep an eye on him.
“I told him as a party chair that he needed to think about public perception,” said DFL Party chair Beth Commers. “And he did.”
As a result, Thao, who had been recruiting endorsement votes for school board candidate Omar Syed, spent at least half of the seven-hour convention in the front row of the Washington Technology Magnet School auditorium, under the watchful eye of Commers and others.
“I didn’t want to create anymore conflict,” Thao said Monday, after denying any wrongdoing. “I just sat out.”
The citywide convention drew some 400 party delegates and volunteers, many of them first-time convention-goers.
Emily Flower said Thao was urging “bullet-voting,” or voting for a single candidate instead of four, so as to block any candidate from achieving the requisite 60 percent of the vote needed to win the party endorsement. The strategy is sometimes frowned upon but hardly unprecedented in multi-seat races.
Flower said the problems started before the first ballot, as she was engaging two Syed supporters — both of them East African — and tried to encourage them to vote for Chauntyll Allen as their second, third or fourth choice after Syed.
Flower, who lives in Minneapolis, said Thao then appeared behind her and told the Syed supporters that voting for more than one candidate on the endorsement ballot was not allowed, even though there are four school board seats up for election in November.
“Dai comes from behind and says, ‘You’re only allowed to vote for one candidate,'” Flower said Monday. “I looked at him and said, ‘They’re only allowed to vote for one candidate?’ He said, yes, on the first ballot, then on the second ballot you can vote for someone else.”
On Monday, Thao denied phrasing his support for Syed that way.
“What I said was people have a choice,” Thao said. “They can vote for up to four people. But if they want to vote for one person, they can do that, too. … That’s their right. That’s up to them.”
Also a delight was Dai Thao’s joyful support for Omar Syed, across racial lines. After, CouncilmanThao gathered folks (white, black, Asian and Somali) for a photo with Syed, saying “now every refugee kid can look at this and say, ‘I can do this, too!’”
— Sakki Selznick (@SelznickSakki) June 24, 2019
Flower said she found the alleged misinformation alarming, especially coming from a City Council member. Accusations that East African immigrants had been misled about the endorsement process had previously overshadowed the Ward 1 convention in April, during which Thao received the party backing for a council seat after two other candidates walked out in protest.
Immediately after the encounter with Thao on Sunday, Flower contacted convention co-chair Chuck Repke.
“I insisted he address it,” she said. “There was nothing about Allen’s campaign versus Omar’s campaign. This was specifically Dai. … It was icky.”
‘VOTE FOR UP TO FOUR’
In a Facebook video circulated after the convention, Commers — the party chair — can be heard taking Thao aside and strongly urging him to take a seat in the front row and avoid further contact with delegates. He obliged.
Around the same time, Commers and other convention workers took the microphone and addressed the crowd directly, encouraging delegates to vote for whom they wanted and not to be coerced or misled.
“All throughout the day, we had translators saying, ‘You can vote for up to four candidates, you can vote for up to four,'” said Commers, who said she went into the convention ready to respond to delegate concerns in light of the Ward 1 convention.
Ahmed Hersi, a Syed supporter and former council candidate, called the warning unnecessary. He said he and others had been diligent about explaining to Somali-American delegates in their native language that they could choose up to four candidates.
Many did not. After the first two ballots, some observers were taken aback when a large percentage of delegates cast votes for one candidate instead of four, resulting in “under-votes” of 19 percent and 26 percent, respectively.
Hersi said despite the urging from party leaders, many delegates had voted solely for Syed, who was still unable to secure the endorsement.
“After (Commers) explained it to them, they still continued to vote for him and no one else,” Hersi said. “It didn’t change anything. … There’s absolutely nothing wrong with voting for one person, or two, or three.”
By the third ballot, however, the number of ballots cast for just one candidate had decreased, Commers said.
The party ultimately endorsed Zuki Ellis, Steve Marchese and Allen, but none of the remaining candidates was able to reach the requisite 60 percent of the vote and secure party backing for the fourth seat.
Josh Verges contributed to this report.
