September 01, 2024 03:23 PM UTC

Dave Williams Strikes Back With Even Bigger One-Sided Vote

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Bente Birkeland reports, the faction of the Colorado Republican Party’s Central Committee loyal to embattled chairman Dave “Brandon Who?” Williams met as planned under a bridge in Bayfield a month ago to vote on whether to retain Williams as chairman–and like the vote last week by dissident central committee members to oust Williams, the vote was completely one-sided, though this time backing Williams up as lopsidedly as he was condemned before:

The faction of the Colorado Republican Party supporting embattled state chair Dave Williams gathered at a church in Castle Rock on Saturday to reaffirm him as the legitimate head of the state GOP.

The meeting was a direct rebuke to a gathering of Williams’ opponents last Saturday in Brighton, in which they voted to oust him.

In a call to action urging Republican Central Committee members to attend the Aug. 31 meeting, Williams wrote, “This past Saturday we witnessed an attempted coup of our legally elected grassroots leadership. Are you willing to let a fringe minority faction of the Uniparty be your voice and the voice for over 900,000 Colorado Republicans?”

As Ernest Luning of the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog reports, more central committee members participated in yesterday’s “officially sanctioned” vote than last week’s vote in Brighton at a meeting convened without Williams, and which Williams had instructed his supporters not to go near:

The vote at Saturday’s meeting in Castle Rock was 191.5 to 10 against removing Williams and his fellow state party officers, Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman and Secretary Anna Ferguson, with 2.5 votes abstaining. (Party rules assign fractional votes to some of the Republicans’ central committee members.)

At the meeting held a week earlier in Brighton, which was open to the press, Republicans voted 161.66 to 12 to oust Williams, followed by nearly identical votes to remove Scheppelman and Ferguson.

Williams and his executive cronies argue that the vote in Brighton was invalid from the start, since the official meeting scheduled for August 31st had already been designated as the only officially sanctioned venue for the vote on Williams’ future. If pretender-chair Eli Bremer had wanted to seal Williams’ fate without going to court, he could have directed his supporters in person or as proxies to turn out at yesterday’s meeting in Castle Rock and reprise their vote to oust Williams. Having gotten the vote he wanted last week, Bremer seems to be depending on the courts to uphold his win instead of risking another round of voting.

As for Williams? If the only thing that matters is the size of his caucus, his apparently measured up about 30 fractional votes bigger. It will be up to a higher power, courts or Washington Republicans or a combination thereof, to determine which consummation was the real deal.

In the meantime, our advice to Colorado Democrats is to keep doing what Colorado Republicans aren’t doing–getting out the vote.