On May 14th, 2025, the Mayflower Republican Party officially closed candidate registration for its internal Executive Committee elections. Voting followed from May 19th to 21st, and when results were posted, members were stunned to learn that dozens of ballots had been disqualified without prior notice or explanation.
In total, 183 voteswere thrown out by Administrator Hitchlink. Analysis of internal voting records revealed that a majority of those disqualified ballots, 77%, were cast for just three candidates, all part of the same coalition. The breakdown is shown below.
Candidate
Number of Votes Lost
TradeEffect
41
ZoomMaarten
37
AnakinT0ast
33
These three candidates, each running for a top leadership position, accounted for over 60% of disenfranchised votes, while the winner of the election, ModernMcNoble, only had around 25%. While not all disqualified ballots were publicly detailed, this data suggests a disproportionate impact on a single coalition.
MPBS confirms that 183 ballots were disqualified in the May 2025 MRP internal elections, affecting 59 individual voters. All disqualified ballots were tagged with the internal markers yellow, red, or purple, categories that were never explained in any published guideline or made clear in an announcement. The majority of these disqualified ballots, over 60%, were cast for the Zoom/TradeEffect/Anakin coalition.
The MRP Administrator, Hitchlink, defended these removals by citing the Mayflower Republican Party bylaws, which he claimed required pre-election verification and disallowed members of other political organizations. However, Hitch later admitted that the Executive Committee never voted to adopt these bylaws. Instead, he wrote and enforced them unilaterally.
No, [the bylaws were not voted on], for two key reasons,” Hitch wrote. “First, the original bylaws… were too limited. Second, the ‘Executive Committee’ as a formal body did not exist until I defined it in the newly ratified bylaws I authored.
The current Executive Committee [before the most recent party elections] did not receive a copy. They’re not in any of the group chats, and we did not vote on them.
He also confirmed that by rules were posted in a private GC with WooleyMcNoble, from which he had been removed. No server-wide announcement, tag, or ping was made to notify voters of the eligibility rules used to disqualify them.
Despite claiming the rules were clear and consistently enforced, Hitch admitted he enacted the bylaws himself, defined the Executive Committee in them, and applied them to disqualify voters. There is no clause in the bylaws granting the administrator this authority without committee vote.
The document itself states in Article IX that amendments require a two-thirds vote of the Executive Committee, and in Article III that the Executive Committee is the governing body. The bylaws were never presented to or voted on by that body before being enforced.
Hitch defended his refusal to limit voter eligibility by saying server access was intentionally left open for transparency. But this contradicts 2024 precedent, where server invites were paused to prevent last-minute ballot stuffing. Senator Anakin confirmed this deviation:
Standard has NOT been consistent. We pause server invites. That is standard for election cycles. Hitch has not run a GOP election in 2025.
Hitch’s defense of the vote disqualifications came after results were challenged. He cited the party bylaws and Clark County rules, but failed to provide any documentation showing when the disqualification standards were posted, distributed, or voted on. When asked by MPBS whether these rules were publicly posted, he responded only that they were “in the #about channel.”
Furthermore, in screenshots obtained by MPBS, it shows the “Member” role in the MRP Discord being bound to anyone who holds the rank of State Resident or higher in the State of Mayflower group. This directly contradicts Hitchlink’s claim of “[o]nly verified [and] registered members [of the Mayflower Republican Party] who joined before the election period were eligible to vote.”
Users joining the MRP Discord server were automatically assigned the ‘Member’ role via RoVer, based on Roblox group status, not based on political affiliation or consent. No voter was informed that joining or reacting would make them eligible to vote, nor were they given the notice that they were now Republican Party members.
However, no announcement ping, public pin, or timestamped record exists showing that the criteria, such as being in another party server or joining during the voting window, were ever communicated before ballots were rejected.
Disqualified voters were given no opportunity to appeal or contest their removal. Hitchlink confirmed that no individual notice was sent, and no record of a dispute process exists. Despite the large scale of the purge, there has been no audit, no Executive Committee review, and no public accounting of the criteria used. The result was a one-sided enforcement without oversight.
Had the disqualified ballots been counted, ZoomMaarten would have led his opponent WooleyMcNoble by a margin of over 30 votes in the Chairman’s race, flipping the outcome entirely.
