12 Minutes on Accountability

12 Minutes on Accountability

I’d arrived in St. Cloud on Friday night, December 2nd, where I attended a couple meetings in preparation for the MNGOP State Central Committee meeting to be held the following day, which I intended to observe as a guest. Only state central delegates (elected in 2021, and again this coming year, 2023) make up the roughly 300-person voting body. It was an important day for the party because the Chair, David Hann, who was involved in several illegal actions, was running for re-election and could be held accountable and replaced.

During breakfast the morning of, I was notified that Phillip Parrish, a candidate for Chair, had been in a multiple car accident over 1 hour from St. Cloud. His car had been totaled, but he was okay. I decided to go pick him up and drive back with him. I dropped Mr. Parrish at the entrance to St. Cloud Tech High School—he went inside as it was already 11:40am and the process had already begun inside to see if the proposed rules of this convention could be amended to allow nominations from the floor (Mr. Parrish had 28 eligible signatures, 2 short of the requirement by the 5pm Wednesday deadline). It was decided to waive the deadline but instead of 30 signatures, 50 people were required to stand up and form a line to support Mr. Parrish before he could be nominated. More than 50 people did. At just over 50 people those running the meeting cut off this process presumably because they didn’t realize how many were supportive of Mr. Parrish. Remarkably, perhaps in part because the delegate deck was stacked against Mr. Parrish, David Hann was re-elected as Chair.

Accountability

In the 12-minute audio footage above, there is much to comment on, in time.

However, the crux is about accountability.

Mr. Lonergan, who is the Executive Director of the MNGOP, appears not willing to respond to his decision from May of 2022 where he broke his political party’s own proposed rules ahead of the convention to exclude me from participating in the secretary of state endorsement process. (Read the highlights of that decision here - https://leanpub.com/sim2020/read#leanpub-auto-the-secretary-of-state-endorsement)

6 months later, Mr. Lonergan still cannot answer to that.