|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
A little more than a week ago, on the heels of President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic Party delegates from all across the country met virtually to cast ballots for the party’s new nominee.
With near unanimity, those delegates selected Vice President Kamala Harris to take Biden’s spot at the top of the ticket, sparking a wave of enthusiasm within Democratic ranks that has yet to subside.
In Alabama, Harris was also the choice. The unanimous choice … or close to it.
For the last several days, state Democrats have argued publicly over delegates and hurled insults.
But there was a serious allegation somewhat lost in the shuffle: That ADP chairman Randy Kelley and vice chairman for minority affairs Joe Reed didn’t vote for Harris during the virtual voting.
In an email to reporters on Monday, former Sen. Doug Jones said he had been told that the pair didn’t vote for Harris. In a column a day later, al.com columnist Kyle Whitmire reported that Reed and Kelley didn’t vote for Harris out of protest over the delegate ordeal.
Those are two solid sources.
But also on Tuesday, Kelley, in an email to me, emphatically insisted that he voted for Harris. In a follow-up phone interview, he reiterated that it would have been stupid not to vote for her and that he and party leadership had supported Harris from the moment Biden chose to step aside.
In a phone call on Thursday, Reed also emphasized that he voted for Harris, and he pointed out that he and Kelley went so far as to hold a press conference endorsing Harris as the nominee the day after Biden announced his decision.
“Kamala Harris has been an integral part of the successes of the Biden-Harris presidency and those successes are many,” Kelley said at the time. “We are better off than we were four years ago.”
Say what you will about Reed and Kelley, but those are strong points and strong denials.
So, what’s the truth?
After a couple of days of digging, the best answer I can give you is this: It doesn’t appear that Reed or Kelley submitted ballots, but it’s at least possible that could have been a mistake.
No one at ADP or at DNC with knowledge of the voting process wanted to speak on the record about this. Their reasoning was simple: “We’re about to have a convention and we don’t need a bigger s*itshow than we already have,” one delegate told me.
But here’s what they would say without attribution: It’s possible that Reed and Kelley made a mistake when using the virtual system, because it was a new, never-used system, but that the party did not have recorded votes for them at the 5 p.m. cutoff time.
According to a second source, the vote occurred via a link that was emailed to delegates. When a delegate opened the link, there was a page with a single voting option – a list of names that could be chosen. The delegate could only select one name and then submitted their ballot electronically.
A person familiar with the process said that some older delegates did have trouble with the system, but that ADP had set up various people to call those delegates – or accept calls from those delegates – and provide assistance.
At 4:30 on the day of the vote, there remained three outstanding ballots. Two of those belonged to Reed and Kelley, according to a third source. A party official made contact with Kelley to see if he required assistance, the source said, but was told by Kelley that it was under control.
The deadline came and went, and sources at both the DNC and ADP said no ballot from Reed or Kelley was ever received.
That seems like a cut-and-dried example of a snubbing. Except for one thing: To what end?
No matter what you think about Reed and his political gamesmanship, the man rarely does anything without a purpose. And he even more rarely does something like this quietly.
If he and Kelley abstained from voting because of the delegate ordeal, wouldn’t he have said so? Or said something?
And then there’s the history of the Reeds and Harris. In 2019, Kamala Harris made it a point to endorse Reed’s son, Steven, in his bid to become Montgomery’s first Black mayor. The Reeds hosted her at an event. And there’s that whole endorsement thing that Kelley did just after Biden made his announcement — that came right in the middle of the delegate fight.
Maybe it’s like an ADP official suggested: “It might be that it’s a case of thinking they submitted their ballots and they didn’t, because the voting process confused them and they wouldn’t take help.”
If so, it’s worth pointing out, again, that such a scenario is unlikely to occur in a unified party, where everyone is working together for the best outcomes and taking care of each other. In such a case, someone would have caught the problem, offered to help, that help would have been accepted and the correct voting process would have been followed.
But that’s not the party we currently have. And so, we have instead another embarrassing controversy.
For more on the delegate controversy, tune in to this week’s Alabama Politics This Week podcast. Josh Moon and David Person discuss the ongoing dispute among Alabama Democrats and interview former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones. You can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts or on YouTube.
