Stephen Jaffe, the “true progressive” running against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in California’s 12th congressional district, contends Democratic Party leaders rigged its rules to push through Pelosi’s automatic endorsement – likening the move to the Democratic National Committee’s efforts to railroad Bernie Sanders and hand the 2016 presidential primary to Hillary Clinton.

“California Democratic Party has what’s called an automatic endorsement, which means when somebody is an incumbent chooses to run again for the same seat they will be automatically endorsed by the party no matter how badly or poorly they may have done in the term, just proceeded,” Jaffe told The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur.

“I believe politicians should be required to run on their record, and I’m just totally against the automatic endorsement.”

Jaffe said he successfully worked through the party’s process to negate the automatic endorsement and force delegates to consider other candidates, but party leaders pulled a fast one and quashed the plan by changing the rules.

“There is a way to prevent that, and that’s to get 20 percent of the delegates in the district affected (to sign a petition),” Jaffe said. “In my particular case, this just happened within the past few days, I turned in a petition with 20 percent of the delegates for the 12th district, where I’m running.

“I was told by the California Democratic Party Monday … that you didn’t successfully challenge it because your list had 183 names and you turned in 37 signatures, but we used a list with 190 names and you came one short,” Jaffe continued. “So they changed the rules after the game was over, and my understanding is that that is something which is happening statewide in various races around the state to protect incumbents against progressive challengers such as myself.”

The allegations echo themes of favoritism and inter-party power plays that plagued the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential election. Emails between John Podesta, then Clinton campaign chairman, and various party leaders and other power brokers published by Wikileaks highlighted collusion between the party and Clinton campaign to rig the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Donna Brazile took over as DNC chairwoman from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was outed for her role in scam when the leaked emails surfaced shortly before the DNC convention. Brazile recently published a book detailing how the Clinton campaign wrested the nomination from her progressive challenger from Vermont, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Jaffe and Uygur joked about the similarities between the automatic endorsements in California and revelations about last year’s rigged Democratic primary.

“The Democratic establishment rigging the rules in favor of incumbents?” Uygur questioned sarcastically.

“It’s unthinkable, isn’t it?” Jaffe said.

Jaffe said he’s less concerned about getting his party’s endorsement, and more concerned about the repeated examples of corruption within the party.

“What I think is important about this is not so much who gets the endorsement or not. What’s important about this is the corrupt practice that leads to it,” he said.

“You would think that after what happened at the convention, after Brazile’s book, after the WikiLeaks emails that came out, after the fiasco for the party chair, that they would have said, ‘Gee, the lightbulb needs to go on here, we should really stop doing stuff like that.’

“But they don’t, and they’re doing it again now.”