CLEVELAND — Alaska and North Dakota delegates say party officials ignored their petitions demanding a roll call vote on new party rules on Monday. Those two states would have given the platoon of rebel delegates enough signatures to require a roll-call vote on the rules — a sign of party division that party leaders wanted to avoid.
North Dakota delegates said they submitted a petition through official channels, but it was simply ignored. An Alaska delegate waved his state’s petition before the convention chairman — after hours of trying to locate the party secretary, to whom delegates were required to submit the petitions.
Here’s the background: Rebel delegates, having lost on some rules debates in the Rules Committee, wanted to offer a motion demanding a roll call vote on the rules. This effort included both Never Trumpers and Trump backers intent on returning power to the grassroots.
Under RNC rules delegates can demand a roll call vote by submitting petitions with signatures of a majority of seven delegations.
At about 2:20 pm on Monday, New Hampshire delegate Gordon Humphrey submitted an envelope with petitions from nine states. After 4 pm, the convention chairman said that nine delegations had submitted signatures of a majority of their delegations, but there were enough withdrawals — thanks to whipping by RNC members — to disqualify three of those states, leaving the rebels with only six states, one short of the threshold. The Washington Examiner‘s Joel Gehrke reported that party leaders flipped four states.
That’s where Alaska and North Dakota come in.
North Dakota delegate Bette Grande told me Wednesday that on Monday morning, she and allies collected signatures from a majority of her state’s delegates. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus had announced earlier in the day that all motions must be submitted in writing to the secretary of the convention. Grande said she and allies ran around the Quicken Loans Arena seeking out the secretary. “She was unreachable,” Grande said. “She was hiding,” Va. delegate Ken Cuccinelli said. Eventually, they learned the way to submit the signatures: handing them to an RNC staffer in an orange hat on the floor.
This was how New Hampshire’s Humphrey submitted his signatures.
Fellow North Dakota delegate Curly Haughland, a member of the Rules Committee, told me he handed his state’s petition off to an orange-hatted official in the afternoon. He couldn’t name the official.
The RNC never officially acknowledged North Dakota’s signatures. In saying they recieved signatures from nine states, they implied Haughland and Grande say they believe party leaders saw the petition, because some of their fellow delegates say RNC officials personally lobbied them to withdraw their signatures.
Alaska’s delegation had a different type of difficulty. Delegate and Rules Committee member Fred Brown said he tried to deliver petitions to the convention secretary, and couldn’t find her. C-SPAN cameras show him trying to hand them to the convention chairman as the motion is made. Brown told me that security guards barked at him to get back.
If, as the convention chairman said, the party peeled off three states, then Alaska or North Dakota would have been sufficient to hit the seven-state threshold, thus requiring a roll call vote.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
