Report: Santorum could be ineligible for 18 Ohio delegates

Rick Santorum was already known as starting from a deficit, delegate-wise, in Ohio. He failed to qualify for any district delegates in three Ohio congressional districts because he didn't turn in delegate names there.

But his delegate troubles go deeper. According to the Ohio Republican Party tonight, the former Pennsylvania U.S. senator filed incomplete delegate slates in six additional Ohio districts.

Altogether, this means Santorum, who until this week had a fair lead in polls in the Republican nominating race, could be ineligible for 18 Ohio district delegates.

Ohio has 66 delegates total, 63 at stake next Tuesday. The candidate with the most delegates wins. Santorum therefore goes into the Ohio primary election with a 29 percent deficit.

This has always been a curiosity to me, so I checked out the Ohio rules.

First, the 63 delegates that are elected today are unbound. I presume that is why you’d want to pick your delegates, so you’d be sure they they would vote for you, and not some other candidate.

There are 3 delegates for each district, and each district is “winner-take-all”. The rules do not state what happens if the winner didn’t pick a set of delegates; I presume they will pick them some other way.

And while the rules are not clear on this, the rules state that the delegates would be “morally bound” to vote for the winner. This could mean that whichever delegates are selected, they would be expected to vote for the winner, even if they weren’t the candidate’s selected delegates. However, as I said, the rules don’t make clear HOW these are picked, plus the delegates are not legally bound in any case. If Santorum had 1 or 2, I presume they would have been picked first, and then the others selected somehow from the other candidates.

There are 15 at-large, and if nobody gets 50%, they are split proportionately; so if Santorum only has 10 delegates there it won’t matter, he wasn’t going to win 50%.

Note that there are several campaigns that are no longer operating, and some may have had delegates. But again, there is no indication how they will “pick” the delegates — and if Michigan is any indication, they will simply pick Romney’s delegates to go in places Santorum doesn’t have delegates.

It is possible that those districts weren’t ones Santorum would win anyway. I wish there was more info on how the delegates will be assigned in those cases; it could be they’ll go to the 2nd-place winner, but nothing in the rules allows that. And the election is by presidential candidate, not delegate, so people in those districts definitely get to vote for Santorum.

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