the naked city
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WHEN ELECTIONS DON’T MATTER
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The city Democratic Party doesn’t always care what voters think. By Holly Otterbein
NEAL SANTOS
FAIR AND SQUARE: 40th Ward Democrats consider Tracey Gordon too disruptive to honor her May 18 election.
uring May’s primary election, Republicans finally glommed
D the city’s attention for the first time in a half-century — by
thoroughly self-destructing. In order to squash a small,
but ballooning cadre of party newcomers, the Republican City
Committee (RCC) filed ballot-petition challenges against members
of its own party, rewrote bylaws to make it harder to elect its own
committee persons, and declined to recognize a dozen of its own
ward leaders.
Now a small group says the Democratic City Committee (DCC)
treats its rookies the same way.
This winter, six residents of the 40th Ward, in Southwest Phila-
delphia, decided to do an innocent enough thing: They ran for
Democratic committee positions. None of them — Tracey Gordon,
Than Lim, Donald Henry, Tony McCloud, Beverly Austin and
Robin Akers — were committee persons at the time, and many
were utterly fresh to city politics.
They say they wanted to make their community a better place.
Gordon, for instance, who serves as president of the community
group Southwest Concerned Citizens, thought she might able to
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lift the voter participation rate in her ward. At about 8 percent
during nonpresidential election years, it ranks among the lowest
in the city. Henry, meanwhile, wanted to see fewer young people
getting into trouble.
“The ward doesn’t place enough emphasis on finding something
for the youth here to do,” he says.
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The city Democratic Party didn’t share the group’s zeal. In
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March, Steven Kaplan, an attorney for the DCC, filed ballot peti-
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tion challenges against all six.
“In some of these divisions where they filed challenges, there
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wasn’t even another committee person running,” says Damon
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2001 Walnut St. Roberts, the group’s pro-bono attorney. “These were good people
Philadelphia they were challenging, too. Henry is president of the Eastwick
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tomstephenson@allstate.com Dynasty Dragons Youth Organization; McCloud owns a small
business.”
The DCC says that it took the fledglings to court because they
didn’t have enough legitimate signatures of registered Democrats
to get on the ballot. (You need 10.) Gordon, however, remembers
things a little differently. In her telling, Ann Brown, one of the two
Democratic leaders of the 40th Ward, chided the group for running
against existing committee persons.
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“Where in America do you have to ask to run for election?” (Brown
denies saying that.)
Everyone in the group was either kicked off the ballot or with-
drew from the race. Well, almost: On March 22, the Court of
Common Pleas denied the DCC’s challenge to Gordon. On Election
Day in May, she won with 38 votes.
But on June 7, at the ward’s first post-election meeting, deputy
chair Gregory Moses suggested that the committee oust Gordon.
He cited a bylaw to support his position:
“If at any time in the opinion of the majority of the entire ward
committee, a member is unfaithful to the Democratic Party
and the best interests of the party, or refuses, fails or neglects
to work in harmony with the ward committee, the ward committee
shall be empowered to remove said person from its membership.”
The committee agreed, and unanimously voted Gordon out. A
police officer — Brown says she called the cops ahead of time to
make sure that Gordon went
“How can quietly — escorted her out-
a ward go side. Brown readily admits
that her animus was moti-
against the vated, in part, by Gordon’s
will of the support of the five other out-
citizens who siders who also ran for com-
elected me?” mittee positions. Brown adds
that when she got Gordon a
job with then-Mayor John Street’s Office of Community Services,
Gordon lost it because she was “disruptive.” Gordon says she was,
in fact, laid off.
“She filed committee people against the ward,” says Brown. “She
tried to take over the ward.” (The 40th Ward, it’s worth noting, has
a total of 102 available Democratic committee positions.)
Gordon asked for a copy of the bylaw she broke. That request was
denied. She also phoned the DCC, Philly Democratic kingpin U.S.
Rep. Bob Brady and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party about the
meeting, but heard zip back.
“How can a ward go against the will of the citizens who elected
me?” she asks.
Quite easily, it turns out: According to Jonathan David, director
of voter services at the Committee of Seventy, it “may not seem
right, but it’s legal.”
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