Orange County Democratic Central Committee takes sharp rightward shift

[Albert Einstein]

Tragic but apparently true. At the 2004 CC election, serious voting irregularities, misleading mailers and a ballot order that appeared contrived to give the most liberal AD to the conservatives cost the best of the liberals their seats. Their replacements were much more conservative and from the make-no-difference crowd.

It is well known within Orange County political circles, that there was a war to purge the Orange County CC of vulnerable Kucinich supporters. There are reports of one Kucinich person actually being threatened by one of the more conservative county party officers. When the people who backed Bush in the Ranger's stadium deal (a land swindle) came to the CC, the Kucinich people were reportedly told to use their knowledge about computer voting to grill the Registrar and the E-Slate people. The Kucinich people did so and reportedly did not endear themselves to either E-Slate or the Registrar. The county chairman reportedly announced he was convinced by the E-Slate presentation. Later, in a district where it is normally hard to fill the seats, every Tom, Dick and Harry jumped in to contest. This was probably the first contest in the history of the 69th. The ballot had a suspicious order to the listing of names for Orange County's most liberal AD. The listing was not random and not alphabetical. The incumbent members were placed at the bottom of a long list. Some of the people involved said they wondered if a deal had been cut.

The conservative opponents joined together and sent out expensive mailers falsely implying that a popular political figure had endorsed them. Only a close reading of the mailer indicated that there was no actual endorsement. The liberals reportedly decided there were more important campaigns that needed their attention and decided not to campaign for themselves. However, an analysis of the results later showed that a computer glitch which caused all the voting machines to go down in the precinct of one of the liberal candidates and the ballot order were the two major factors in determining the result. So they were probably right in not wasting their money. The candidate whose precinct was disenfranchised lost to a more conservative candidate by 13 votes. Even the county Registrar admitted that the computer problems had changed the outcome of the race.

The biggest concern is that the people who lost their seats, along with an incumbent who survived, were the ones who fought for a voter-verifiable paper trail, for peace and against the right-wing nominations. The OC Central Committee has a reputation for only doing what is safe and not doing anything controversial and not making waves that might upset the conservative population in the county. The members who were under attack were the heroes of the committee who got it to take action. The county party has suffered a great loss.

There is a good ending to all this. The liberals have had so much support from people within their AD that they were selected to run their AD committee and represent it at the state level by very high super-majorities. So in the future, most liberals can expect more results from AD committees in Orange County than from the county central committee, itself.

[Downtown Hound]

1. Good thing about the result

Orange County is one area I'd like to see go blue. San Diego is currently going in that direction, so if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.