When Republican delegates cast their votes on Tuesday, the votes recorded by the party secretary differed from the vote totals shouted out by the state delegations.
My colleague Jason Russell broke down the vote differences, and found a net gain of 74 delegates by Trump. Sometimes it was a pretty stark scene, such as when Utah called out 40 delegates for Ted Cruz and the secretary recorded “40 delegates, Trump.”
Some of the state delegations were pretty upset. D.C., Utah and Alaska, for instance, raised ruckuses after the secretary called out their votes.
The short explanation is this: RNC officials had a different interpretation of state and RNC rules than state delegations did.
Here are the specifics from some states:
District of Columbia
Originally: 10 Rubio, nine Kasich
Recorded as: 19 Trump
D.C. rules prescribed that “if only one candidate’s name is placed in nomination at the Republican National Convention, all delegates shall be bound to vote for such candidate on the first ballot provided that the candidate received votes in the D.C. presidential preference poll.”
Bob Kabel, D.C.’s national committeeman, agreed these rules would swing all their votes to Trump, but told me, “We thought we had them waived … We thought we had an agreement.”
Specifically, Kabel — a member of the Rules Committee — told me that he supported the party leadership’s rules binding delegates to popular vote results on the promise that this would bind D.C.’s delegates to D.C.’s vote, resulting in 10 Rubio and nine Kasich votes.
That wasn’t how the RNC understood it.
Utah
Originally: 40 Cruz
Recorded as: 40 Trump
The relevant Utah GOP bylaw is this:
“If a candidate who was allocated delegates is not a candidate at the national convention according to the rules of that convention, then all the delegates shall be re-allocated and bound to the remaining candidates in accordance to the rules in this section.”
Senator, delegate and rules committee member Mike Lee called this “an obscure state rule,” and said he was surprised it was invoked.
Alaska
Originally: 12 Cruz, 11 Trump, five Rubio
Recorded as: 28 Trump
Alaska’s rules basically swing delegates away from any candidate who drops out of the race. Fred Brown, an Alaska delegate and rules committee member, argued that that rule didn’t apply because Rubio and Cruz “suspended their campaigns, they didn’t drop out. The rule is about if they drop out.”
The delegates successfully won a poll of their delegation, but the party ruled, in effect, that “suspending” was “drop[ping] out.”
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.
