In addition to the voice vote issue mentioned above, there’s the slight problem that rules changes are supposed to wait until the next convention.
I have two problems with all this:
I think this is indicative of how Romney & crew would operate if elected. “Fuck democracy and the rules, we want to do this therefore we are doing it.”
The primaries in many (most?) states are paid for with taxpayer dollars and I have a real problem with the GOP leadership deciding that the voters in a particular state got it wrong and therefore, their votes don’t count.*
I have little concern about the actual GOP here. I’m a Democrat and I’m voting for Obama, but I’d like to think I’d have the same objections if it was the Democratic Party pulling this kind of bullshit.
*This is a bit personal since Florida is getting screwed at this convention because the GOP says that an election that I (helped) pay for didn’t meet their rules (an election BTW, set by a super-majority Republican legislature and signed by a Republican Governor). The GOP wants to set the rules, they can fucking well pay the bill. Florida needs to respond with a rule that says “you agree ahead of time to seat our delegates or we ain’t paying for the primary. And if you don’t hold a primary in Florida, your candidate don’t appear on the ballot.” It’s a pipe dream, but it would, maybe, start to reign in the party primacy that’s ruining this country.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in the incredibly convoluted convention process. But I don’t think that’s right. There was a vote to change the times rules could be changed, but that still didn’t effect this convention. It just allows them to change the rules for 2016 after the end of this convention (previously, they had to make all changes four years in advance).
Googling, I’ve found several contradictory explanations of what happened, many from fairly reliable news sources. So I officially give up. No one else seems to be able to figure out exactly what the rules are, were or are supposed to be either.
What’d be wonderful is if Ron Paul got the presidency, was deemed too old to govern for a second term and his son got the nomination instead. Cuz there’s nothing more the founding fathers would have wanted than hereditary succession.
I think the problem was, the Republican National Committee wanted to show that they were “unanimously” behind Mitt Romney - or is there a different explanation as to why the Assistant Secretary refused to confirm any delegate votes for anybody besides Romney? There was even one instance where, as Georgia was reading its vote, somebody turned off the microphone right after the speaker read Romney’s vote but before reading Ron Paul’s, and, at least on the C-SPAN feed, you hear somebody say something like, “Whoever is controlling the microphone did a good job there!”. To be fair, the Secretary did ask for the entire Georgia vote to be repeated, rather than just pretending that there were no Ron Paul votes and carrying on with the count.
