Feinstein Finds Fault with Process

Kathleen Herd Masser
Mirror contributing writer
  
   The disappointment was evident on Michael Feinstein’s face when he lost the SMRR endorsement on Sunday. But he’s staying in the race and pledges not to abandon the organization’s ideals.
   “I’m running on my platform,” he says, “which shares a great deal in common with the SMRR.”
   Feinstein says that although “SMRR insiders worked to deny me the endorsement, that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been as good as or better than anyone in achieving the objectives of the SMRR platform.”
   He believes that had the voting been done by mail, he would have been “overwhelmingly endorsed. But the current process in which only 3 to 5 percent of the members vote makes it very easy for vote buying by organized groups working together to throw a convention.
   “It’s likely that as many as half [of those at the convention] have only joined for the sake of voting at that convention and are otherwise unlikely to be involved, [but] they have a disproportionate effect. By contrast, if postal mail ballots went out to all members and there was only a 25% response, that would be 1,000 people. And coordinated vote buying would have far less effect.”
   “One thing that I’ve noticed at the last few SMRR conventions,” Feinstein says, “is that there are a whole lot of people voting that you have never seen before and don’t see afterwards. Just like the 2000 presidential election showed how fragile and flawed our federal voting system is in the case of a close election, the last two SMRR conventions show how desperately SMRR’s own process is in need of reform.”