A GOP delegate has won his lawsuit challenging a Virginia law that would have forced him to vote for Donald Trump on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention next week.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the Virginia statute, which carries a sentence of up to 12 months of jailtime or a $2,500 fine or both, “is an unconstitutional burden on his First Amendment rights of free political speech and political association.”
The case was brought by Virginia delegate Carroll Boston Correll, who “pleads under oath that he ‘believes that Donald Trump is unfit to serve as President of the United States and that voting for Donald Trump’ on the first ballot at the 2016 Republican National Convention, as required by Section 545(D), ‘would therefore violate Correll’s conscience.'”
The federal court’s ruling arrived on the heels of anti-Trump delegate Kendal Unruh’s announcement that there are enough delegates on the RNC’s Rules Committee to force the entire convention to vote on whether or not delegates should be free to vote their conscience on the first ballot in the GOP nomination.
One pro-Trump delegate told the Wall Street Journal‘s Reid Epstein last week that it wasn’t certain Trump would win a majority of delegates if they were allowed to vote their conscience:
To win the Republican presidential nomination, a candidate must win the votes of 1,237 delegates, a simple majority of all delegates at the convention.
