RTD: $62,000 In Taxpayer Funds Wasted

rpvs dysfunctionC’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.  Worse than a crime, this was a mistake.

The fallout from the “loyalty oath” saga is turning into a laughingstock.  From the RTD:

At nearly $53,000, the largest expense was printing the nearly 3 million forms containing the so-called statement of affiliation, which could be shelved for the March 1 primary after a Republican party committee voted over the weekend to ask the state not to implement the oath. The State Board of Elections has called a special meeting for Thursday morning to discuss the Republicans’ request to stop the oath.

Martin Mash, a policy adviser for the elections agency, provided a list of costs Tuesday. In an email, Mash gave a direct cost estimate of $62,398, but said there may be other costs not factored in to that amount. The spending covers printing and mailing, but not staff time or legal work.

Now if the Democratic Party of Virginia had wasted this sort of cash, what do you think we’d be hearing from RPV right now?  We’d ask for the Dems to compensate the taxpayer for the loss, would we not?

More to the point, this is the comedy of errors that seems to have gripped the state party for some time now.  This could have been stopped at so many critical junctures: by voting up a convention when the vote was tied in June 2014 (where after a prolonged recess, a primary was magically produced), not asking for a loyalty oath, not enforcing the loyalty oath when the State Board of Elections made it impractical, calling for an emergency Executive Committee session to fix the problem, etc.

Instead?  Rather than accepting responsibility, we shift blame… as seems to be the modus operandi of the regency council to date, as noted by the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot:

Party officials, though, went further. In a press release, officials said the RPV’s central committee unanimously voted to rescind the loyalty oath not because the party was wrong, or because the idea of a loyalty oath to vote is so repellent.

Instead, the vote reflected that “Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s administration and Attorney General [Mark] Herring had purposely created a situation designed to confuse voters intending to participate in the March 1 Republican [p]residential [p]rimary.”

The RPV blamed the McAuliffe administration for editing its original verbiage, for adding intimidating language designed to “dampen turnout.”

Since the Virginia Republican Party had spent weeks defending the loyalty oath from criticism by its own members, and by Virginians of no partisan persuasion, these new cries of victimhood are unlikely to convince anybody.

You do have to give 1st District Chairman Eric Herr credit for sticking the knife through the heart of the loyalty oath, though.  Unlike others who have criticized State Central for voting for it before they were against it, the direction was clear — even though the conventioneers lost, they still did their best to protect the vote.  When the State Board of Elections made that impractical, the failures of leadership began in earnest… Herr was 100% right to stomp it out where he did, when he did.  That’s guts… entirely commendable, IMO.

Yet this is a $62,000 (or more) mistake that deserves some reckoning.  One suspects that DPVA will demand the taxpayer be remunerated, and they’d be right to do so.  Yet it is one more blunder, one more incompetency, one more error that sadly seems to be excused, shifted, or laid at the feet of circumstance or others.

McDonnell, Bolling, Cuccinelli all won with a convention in 2009.  Conventions gave us Gillespie in 2014.  Conventions gave us Obenshain in the late 1970s.  Conventions time and time again have proven their resilience, not to mention create the independent Republican Party that is beholden to the grassroots, not to someone else’s checkbook in Washington.

Again — this is why we support conventions, folks.

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