We may now have a brokered Republican Convention AND a Brokered Democratic Convention too. What an Unconventional year?
begin quote from:
How Colorado confusion could spell convention trouble
| CNN | - |
Colorado
Springs, Colorado (CNN) Ted Cruz's resounding win in Colorado's GOP
contest this weekend provided fresh evidence that Donald Trump's
campaign is still scrambling to catch up in the state-by-state delegate
hunt.
How Colorado confusion could spell convention trouble
Story highlights
- Donald Trump's campaign is mad about the delegate selection process in Colorado
- The GOP front-runner says political insiders are plotting against him
Colorado Springs, Colorado (CNN)Ted Cruz's resounding win in Colorado's GOP contest this weekend provided fresh evidence that Donald Trump's campaign is still scrambling to catch up in the state-by-state delegate hunt.
But
the Trump campaign's threat that they might challenge the Colorado
results at the Republican National Convention showed something else:
Their campaign is gearing up for battle in Cleveland -- and no error
will go unnoticed.
The debate over the national delegate selection in Colorado this weekend qualified as the very definition of inside baseball.
But
that is the game that the GOP campaigns will be playing at the
convention if no candidate reaches the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch
the nomination before Cleveland.
By
Sunday, the Trump campaign had voiced a litany of complaints about
Colorado's complex process, even though it was obvious on the ground
that they had not done the aggressive leg work to court Colorado
delegates that the Cruz team had done.
"I
win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because
they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign. Bad system!"
Trump tweeted Sunday.
Later in the day, Trump took
to Twitter again to protest the fact that Colorado did not hold a
primary or a caucus, due to costs, and inside used arcane party rules
for choosing delegates.
"How is it
possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to
vote in the Republican Primary?" Trump tweeted Sunday evening. "Great
anger - totally unfair!"
He also retweeted a link to a
Facebook post where one of his supporters burned his Colorado
Republican Party registration over anger at the process at the Colorado
state convention.
Then he declared: "The
people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony
politicians. Biggest story in politics. This will not be allowed!"
On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, Trump's new convention manager Paul Manafort accused the Cruz campaign of using "Gestapo tactics" to wrangle delegates.
Cruz
campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said the campaign had won
"because we've put in the hard work to build a superior organization,"
dismissing the complaints as sour grapes.
But
it was the threat of a convention challenge over the ballot problems in
Colorado this weekend that is the kind of legal spat that could lead to
campaign-on-campaign legal warfare at the convention.
If
a campaign alleges that delegates were elected improperly, those
challenges can be heard by the credentials committee, which decides
whether the delegates in question will be allowed on the floor to vote.
In
a race that could be decided by handful of delegates those challenges
could be a pivotal part of the nomination process this cycle.
To
the casual observer of politics, the details of what went awry for the
Trump campaign in Colorado Springs might seem like an irrelevant debate
over minutia. National delegate ballot positions, to be exact.
Ballot
positions were assigned to more than 600 people who ran for the final
13 delegate slots at the GOP convention on Saturday.
To
narrow the field, each presidential campaign printed up slates listing
the national delegate candidates that they had endorsed. Those slates
were handed out by volunteers at the convention.
But
the slates put out by the Trump campaign contained numerous errors when
it matched names to ballot numbers. At the Congressional District 7
convention Thursday night where three convention delegates were
selected, the slate printed by the Trump campaign contained the names of
two delegate candidates supporting Trump who weren't even running in
that district.
On the first slate
printed by Trump campaign for Saturday's election -- which detailed the
names and ballot numbers of 26 people who were running to be Trump
delegates at the convention -- more than a half dozen names were listed
with inaccurate ballot numbers.
Inside the battle to become a Colorado GOP delegate 02:32
If
you were a Trump supporter at the convention hoping to support his
slate of delegates that mattered -- a lot -- because the paper ballots
that attendees used to cast their votes late Saturday afternoon
contained only numbers, not the names of each delegate candidate.
The
Trump campaign printed a second slate that was meant to correct the
corresponding numbers and names that were wrong on the first slate. But
there were mistakes on the second as well.
The campaigns of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich
did not have the same problems -- suggesting that the mistakes could
have amounted to printing errors by the Trump campaign on their slates.
But
the ballot distributed by the state party did include at least one
clerical error: There was no bubble on the ballot for delegate candidate
#379 (who was running as a Trump delegate, according to the state party
list). Instead in the spot where #379 should have appeared, there was a
second bubble for #378 (who was running as an unpledged delegate).
Another wrinkle: Inside the
convention program printed by the state party, the list of candidates
running for the 13 national delegate slots (and their corresponding
ballot numbers) only went up to #588, even though there were 619
candidates.
The state GOP printed a
supplemental ballot and placed the names and ballot positions of the
remaining candidates on two screens above the stage, but Trump
supporters said that not every attendee got one.
Beyond
that, the Trump campaign said a number of their potential national
delegates had their ballot positions changed. Others, Trump advisers
said, filed the proper paperwork but never ended up on the ballot.
"We're
not taking a credential challenge off the table," said Trump adviser
Alan Cobb. "It's something we'll be looking into over the next few
months."
A spokesman for the Colorado GOP said party officials were looking into whether there were problems with the ballot.
But it's clear the Trump campaign is not going to be dismissing these issues anytime soon.
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