Once the troublesome Board members were removed, it was necessary to secure the party against the inevitable backlash both from the Mises members who had been removed and from the others in the party who might think, with justification, that the actions taken were underhanded and wrong.
We are sympathetic to that point of view, but the fact remains that leaving the party to the meddling of the Mises Caucus for two years was unacceptable. Steps needed to be taken to guard against any recurrence of a take over attempt.
This was done in two ways. First, the state party tightened control over county affiliates. Many state parties allow for counties to be disaffiliated from the state if necessary. This authority was not contained in the Libertarian Party of Delaware's governing documents. In addition to disaffiliation, we included several other options short of that to deal in particular with problematic officers, members, and decisions in the hopes that disaffiliation would not become necessary.
Second, we tightened membership requirements. Prior to the changes, anyone registered Libertarian or a sustaining member of the National LP residing in Delaware for at least sixty days, who was assumed absent evidence to the contrary to have agreed to abide by our governing documents, was considered a member. This included over 2,100 registered Libertarians and a partially overlapping 100 or so National members. With the exception of about 50 of them, none of these "members" ever came to meetings or were in any way involved with the party. The change we made kept these requirements in place, with the additional requirement of approval on a temporary or permanent basis by a majority of the State Board, which could likewise be revoked with a 2/3rds vote.
This was an emergency measure. Understandably, many in the party locally and nationally are not happy about this change, though similar requirements in theory if not quite in implementation exist all over the country. Further amendments are pending to allow the conventions, in addition to the State Board, to approve memberships and for the convention to waive the approval requirement for all qualified individuals for the duration of the convention. We are also examining other less subjective methods of vetting and seasoning potential members to prevent future takeovers by the Mises Caucus or anyone else.
These changes were noticed on October 1st immediately after the expulsions, and were adopted on October 31st. 31 members have been approved so far, with an extensive outreach program in progress to actually involve the other ~2,100 qualified potential members to vet them and restore their memberships.
