Frey campaign asks DFL to invalidate Fateh endorsement

In either scenario, the failure is disqualifying for the results

Citing “several well-documented problems” at the Minneapolis DFL endorsing convention, Mayor Jacob Frey is asking the statewide DFL Party to invalidate the Minneapolis DFL’s endorsement for mayor.

On Saturday, the Minneapolis DFL held its endorsing convention inside the Target Center. At that event, the party unit endorsed candidates for many local offices, but the most anticipated contest was the race for the DFL mayoral endorsement.

At the moment, the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral election is viewed as a contest between two candidates: Frey and State Sen. Omar Fateh, DFL-Minneapolis. Frey is serving his second term as mayor after winning the office in 2017 and 2021, and Fateh is in his second term as a senator.

Both candidates are decidedly left-wing, but Frey is viewed as more mainstream given his clashes with the democratic socialists on the city council. Meanwhile, Fateh has drawn comparisons to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Like Mamdani, Fateh is Muslim and aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

At Saturday’s convention, Fateh claimed the Minneapolis DFL’s endorsement for mayor. However, that endorsement came amidst allegations of faulty electronic voting systems and other problems. In the end, the endorsement was awarded to Fateh when delegates simply raised up their badges to indicate their preferred candidate.

In a formal challenge, Frey’s campaign is asking the statewide DFL to intervene and nullify the endorsement due to the problems at the convention.

The campaign’s primary rationale for its request is the alleged failure of the convention’s electronic voting system. According to the Frey campaign, there were only 578 votes on the first ballot for the mayoral endorsement despite the fact that there were over 1,000 delegates and alternates checked in at the time the first ballot was conducted.

The campaign said there is no plausible reason why so many delegates would not vote on the most high-profile race at the convention.

“Either the electronic balloting system did not correctly tabulate and record hundreds of votes that were cast, or the electronic balloting system malfunctioned so badly that those votes were never received by the system in the first place,” wrote the campaign. “In either scenario, the failure is disqualifying for the results.”

Further, the campaign said the electronic voting system malfunctioned so badly that the system was later discarded by the convention and the chairman of the Minneapolis DFL acknowledged the system was flawed.

Finish reading this article at Alpha News.