Thanks for this Joe. I’m not sure what difference the distinction between “disaffiliation” and “declaring a county inactive" makes in practice, but I think you’re technically correct there’s no such thing as “disaffiliating” a county party, and the bylaws don’t list any reason other than lack of elections for such a declaration:
LPC Bylaws, Bylaw 10
Section 6
A county organization is deemed as having selected its officers only if an election
notice has been mailed to its members at least thirty days but no more than sixty
days in advance of that election. The election notice shall also be sent to and
received by the Party Secretary at least thirty days in advance of the election. Such
notice shall specify the reason for the meeting and a time and place reasonably
accessible to its membership. An election shall be held every year. The results of
the election shall be reported to the Party Secretary within fifteen days after the
election. Any member of that County Central Committee may challenge the
legality of an election by bringing the issue before the Judicial Committee. The
Executive Committee may declare a county organization to be inactive if it fails to
hold elections in accordance with this section.
The LPSF held officer elections (three times now actually, since January, in an effort to satisfy the state chair). To my knowledge, no San Francisco county central committee member has challenged the legality of any of those elections. Am copying this to our local list.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
···
On Mar 25, 2024, at 3:20 PM, Joe Dehn jwd3@dehnbase.org wrote:
Note that there is no such thing as “disaffiliating” a county organization. The county organizations are not “affiliates” of the state party. It’s easy to understand why people unfamiliar with our bylaws would be confused about this, because the LNC has been full of commotion recently about disaffiliating state organizations, which do have an “affiliate” relationship with the national LP. But that is not how the LPC is structured.
Read the bylaws.
The state party is “divided” into county organizations. This relationship is intrinsic – it was not created by act of the state EC and it can’t be undone by action of the EC. It comes from the map of California – which divides the state into counties.
Every county has a central committee, consisting of those central committee members who reside in that county or have chosen to be part of that county central committee (with the limitation that a particular central committee member may be a member of only one county central committee). This county central committee exists regardless of what the state EC or anybody else says.
The LPC bylaws do make a distinction regarding whether there is an “active county organization”, with that status depending on there being annual elections and the state EC being able to declare a county “inactive” if that isn’t happening.
I presume this is the bylaws provision on which they are relying for whatever motion they are planning to consider at their upcoming meeting, regardless of how poorly they identified it in the agenda.
But as far I can tell, that’s the only basis on which they can take such an action – failure to hold elections. So I presume they are going to claim that whatever you did in the way of an election this year was not good enough, either because of some flaw in providing notice or because you elected somebody who isn’t qualified.
How, exactly, you answer this (to them, or to the Judicial Committee) in the short term will depend on the facts, about which you have far more information than I. But in the long term the answer is to have another election, with proper notice, and find people willing to serve as officers who are qualified.