Democrat Super Delegate Selling Vote For $20 Million

A Democrat super delegate who is a prominent national party member is selling his vote for $20 million and says the money will be used to register and educate Mexican-American voters long neglected by the party.

The California delegate, a retired lawyer who heads the voting rights committee of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus, admits most people might think of him as “some crazy guy in California” for the hefty price tag on his vote. He says the reality is that his own party is crazy for not aggressively pursuing Mexican-American voters.

So Sacramento super delegate Steven Ybarra, a renowned Chicano advocate, publicly warned the two candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—battling for the Democratic nomination that his vote is not free. He also wants to alert them that the nation’s large Mexican-American voters are the key to the White House.

Ybarra, who once served as chair of the Democratic Party’s Chicano Latino Caucus, also made the news in February when he blasted Clinton for removing campaign manager Patti Solis, accusing the New York senator of being disloyal to Hispanics because Solis is of Mexican descent.

He circulated a strongly worded electronic mail that pointed out Clinton’s hypocrisy for depending on Latino voters in the Texas, Ohio and California primaries yet replacing her campaign’s highest ranking Hispanic with a black woman, Maggie Williams. He called the move “dumb as a stump” and assured that Latino delegates like him would have cause to pause. Nothing $20 million can’t help him forget, however.