Ron Paul supporters capture majority of Nevada’s national delegates

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul captured the majority of Nevada’s national delegates early Sunday, overwhelming likely nominee Mitt Romney with an organized contingent who easily took control of the state convention.

Paul’s supporters won 22 of the 25 national delegate slots up for election at the state convention in Sparks on Saturday. Romney won three.

Another three automatic delegates are expected to support Romney, meaning Romney will have six supporters in the delegation and Paul will have 22.

Since you are not involved in party politics and the convention system, I can cut you some slack. Here’s one link that will educate and give you a bit more realistic view of the system, and it was just posted today.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2880885/posts

I am surprised a person as meticulous as you seem to be, plainly does not recognize how corrupt and rigged the presidential nominating system is, just by keeping up with what happened in Iowa, Virginia, and Florida alone.

Your oblique disparaging references accusing people of which you have no personal knowledge of dishonesty, nuttiness, etc. regarding a subject you have admitted you have no personal experience in, marks you broadly as a name-caller and certainly as a character assassin.

So, just educate yourself on the convention system, and take it from me, participation is the only way to gain real understanding of how the process really works.

Only then will you realize how badly you misunderstand our system of party politics, and how the delegate selection process and convention system, far from being obscure and “backroom” as you think, is in reality a strong, vibrant, exciting, open place for the people who care enough to actually participate to get together and iron out their differences for the purpose of selecting the party’s nominee.

Virginia was not corrupt or rigged, and I resent the slander against my own state’s representatives. A lot of people were upset that their candidates couldn’t do the simple task of collecting signatures, and decided it was part of some nefarious plot.

I will note that we just picked senate candidates for a primary using the identical process, and every candidate was able to meet the thresholds, even those who entered the contest late. The guy I’m supporting had over 17,000 signatures.

I was only upset that Rick Perry’s campaign never sent an e-mail asking for supporters in the state to collect signatures. We had a statewide election during the signature process, all they needed was 100 dedicated volunteers scattered at precincts throughout the state; if each collected 200 signatures from voters showing up at the precinct, that would be 20,000 signatures, well above the 15,000 needed.

Worse, the party already staffs most polling places at election day — so you really just needed to drop off signature forms. We had ONE signature form at my precinct table, and it was for Herman Cain. He already had over 25 signatures when I showed up at 7:15am to vote, he probably ended up with a couple hundred from our precinct alone, since we had almost 1000 people vote republican there.

I can’t speak to what happened in other states, but politics is about organization, and a good organization would have little trouble getting 15,000 signatures in Virginia; we have solid republican committees throughout the state, the state party is ready to help, and we have plenty of republicans.

Heck, Rick Perry actually came to the state RPV meeting in September, DURING the signature collection process. All his die-hard supporters came out for lunch and to hear him speak (I was there with my daughter as well). And guess what — NO signature pages were available, and no request was made to the people there to go collect signatures.

I sent e-mails to Perry, Santorum and Gingrich’s campaigns, asking them if they wanted help collecting signatures, and no campaign ever responded. I think they all thought they had it taken care of.

The process isn’t easy, but it is easy to understand, and the rules were clear and easy to follow. Collect 10,000 valid signatures, and you are on the ballot. Collect 15,000 signatures and we’ll assume you won’t get more than 1/3rd rejected, so you’ll be on the ballot (we’ve NEVER had more than 1/3rd of the signatures found to be bad, so the rule makes sense).

As to your general concern about the process being rigged, I don’t see how, even if true, it would make what is being discussed in this thread any more palatable.

I’ll discuss Nevada specifically in another post.

Nevada picks it's delegates by convention. The critical conventions are the local nominating conventions, held February 4, 2012. The state delegates eventually chosen for the RNConvention are bound by rule to vote as specified at this first round of caucuses

These were certified by the state party. :

Nevada Caucus - February 4, 2012 -100% reporting (1800/1800)
Romney 50.0% 16,486 Gingrich 21.1% 6,956 Paul 18.7% 6,175 Santorum 9.9% 3,277

The state party rules indicate that for the 1st ballot at the RNConvention, the delegates are bound by the presidential preference vote taken at the precincts, calculated proportionally based on the votes for the candidates still in the race. That is key, because it means that at the state convention, they re-calculated the delegate selection with only the Romney and Paul votes.

The personal preferences of the selected delegates does not matter for the 1st ballot. The Paul state director insists that their delegates will follow the rules, which means that for the 1st ballot, they will cast 20 votes for Romney, and 8 for Paul (proportional results). The previous numbers were Romney 14, Gingrich 6, Paul 5, Santorum 3.

The suggestion of this article is that somehow Paul now has 22 votes at the convention -- that is clearly not true, at least not for the 1st ballot.

However, you have to ask how, given that at each step, the delegates are chosen by winners at the previous step, Paul people managed to do so well. Partly, I'm sure it's just that they kept showing up. But it is also clear that at the original precinct level, a lot of paul supporters got elected to the next level by people who supported other candidates, and thought they were picking delegates who supported the same candidate. That is where the "misleading" comes in.

We have reports from other caucuses where sample ballots were circulated with the names of candidates (Romney, Santorum) listed, but which actually had mostly Ron Paul delegates on the ballot. Some have been so blatant that the state committees are seriously considering throwing out the results because of the misleading nature. In Nevada, it simply appears that they took over all the party positions, which gave them the ability to vote their own people into the delegate slots

Since they have to vote for Romney anyway, Romney didn't care. It sucks for the supporters of Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich who were active in state politics, who wanted a chance to go to a convention, who showed up at all the caucuses, got elected at the precinct level, and then got shut out at the state by the Ron Paul folks. But if they don't like it, they should take back their party from the Paul people.

Since they have to vote for Romney anyway, Romney didn’t care. It sucks for the supporters of Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich who were active in state politics, who wanted a chance to go to a convention, who showed up at all the caucuses, got elected at the precinct level, and then got shut out at the state by the Ron Paul folks. But if they don’t like it, they should take back their party from the Paul people.

Apparently in Nevada and Maine, there were Romney people with Paul pins handing out fake delegate slates instructing Paul supporters to vote for those delegates. It has the Ron Paul logo on it, and a smattering of better known Paul delegates, but with the rest being for Romney. This is backed up with video evidence and photographs. They also, apparently, smuggled in a bunch of guests to add to the voice votes.

As for Paulite tactics, I think the simple truth of the matter is that a majority of Paul supporters are more enthusiastic and better organized to go caucus for their candidate than are the Romney people.

“Virginia was not corrupt or rigged, and I resent the slander against my own state’s representatives. A lot of people were upset that their candidates couldn’t do the simple task of collecting signatures, and decided it was part of some nefarious plot.”

Of course it’s corrupt and rigged. In Texas you just need 300 signatures to get on a ballot and maybe a fee. The fact that Virginia rules basically disenfranchised a huge amount of voters by keeping almost every major candidate, except for the two most despised, off the ballot is proof enough of that. It’s a system that obviously supports the big money candidate who can buy the organization he needs to do it. So where exactly can the Herman Cains of the world, or the Joe the Plumbers, ever hope to run for President when the system is dominated by our version of the Roman aristocracy?

And as for the caucus system in general. This IS a Republic, after all. I don’t like Paul’s foreign policy either, but if he can throw a wrench in the system and get us into a brokered convention, that could be a godsend to save us from the clutches of the GOPe and Mittens. Even if it fails, I’d rather Mitt be severely damaged than to have to deal with him for 4 years, and have to campaign for him again after that since we wouldn’t even have the option to nominate a conservative. Better to let Obama have the Presidency and focus all our effort in taking the Senate. Besides, as a common enemy, he’ll do a lot more to unify conservatives than Mitt “pathological liar” Romney.

As I said, all the Senate candidates were able to easily get the signatures they needed. And we’ve had the large signature rules for years, and this was the first year there were so many incompetent campaigns.

Of course, it appears that the campaigns mostly refused to get help from the committees, or to help each other out — I think each one was hoping they could collect the signatures, while their opponents would fail.

Romney had no trouble, because he actually had an organization in the state, and paid attention. Ron Paul had no trouble collecting signatures. In 2008, multiple candidates did it.

Your only “evidence” for something being wrong is that we happen to have 4 incompetent campaign organizations this year. These 4 campaigns actually missed the opportunity to collect signatures AT A GENERAL STATEWIDE ELECTION, which is the easiest thing to do. In contrast, the senate candidates just did their collections during the presidential primary, which had extremely low turnout. And yet one candidate collected 21,000 signatures, another over 17,000 signatures, and the other two were able to collect more than enough valid signatures.

BTW, Herman Cain was collecting signatures in the november election, and I bet he had enough signatures to make the ballot. All the other candidates needed to do was to place their petitions on the table next to the Cain ones — the collection at my precinct was being done by the committee volunteer, not a dedicated Cain guy — it was just Cain was the only candidate to ask.

In the aforementioned Senate campaign, Bob Marshall runs entire delegate campaigns with a VOLUNTEER staff — He is a state delegate, but in his second federal senate run, was able to collect over 17,000 signatures. His campaign contacted volunteers on the phone, and was able to collect signatures across the state. Money is one way to get signatures, but you can also simply appeal to the voters.

Perry could have easily gotten 15,000 signatures. He had 11,000 including invalid ones — it would have been easy to get vounteers to collect 4000 more.

GIven that Paul people won 22 out of 25 delegates, it is hard to believe it was Romney’s team that was tricking people — he actually won 50% of the support in the original caucuses, so his team would have to be remarkably incompetent to actually cheat their way from 50% down to 12%.

Oddly, I read several reports here at FR that sounded exactly like your report, except it was Paul people passing around lists that were supposed to be Santorum and Gingrich lists, except most of the names were actually Paul delegates.

As I said, the Romney nefariousness was caught on video and photographs in Nevada and Maine. It is not something for you to believe or not believe. It simply is.

“As I said, all the Senate candidates were able to easily get the signatures they needed. And we’ve had the large signature rules for years, and this was the first year there were so many incompetent campaigns.”

Except that the rules were changed sometime in November or December to up the amount required from 10,000 to 15,000, and also fixed it to where if you get above 15,000 your signatures will not be checked. There are also many other ridiculous nuances to consider in the entire way the state GOP of Virginia handles it.

There’s no real reason why major candidates shouldn’t be getting on a ballot. The only conclusion is that either the GOP of Virginia is incompetent, which is probably the case, or they’re corrupt. I’m happy with either option, especially when they tried pulling the loyalty oath nonsense as well.

I watched one of the Maine videos that supposedly “showed” this. They had a “similar delegate list” which didn’t mention Ron Paul anywhere, and which followed a standard form for delegate lists, and happened to start with the Governor like Ron Paul’s list did. Because it was in the same “format” the video asserted it was a trick. Oddly, the Ron Paul list didn’t mention Ron Paul anywhere — which some would say was itself a trick to not let people know who the delegates were supporting.

The video then found some random guy passing out his own slate, and asserted with no evidence that the guy was a Romney supporter. The problem with this 3rd list was that it had Ron Paul people on it who hadn’t actually agreed that they wanted to go be delegates. Later, the woman making the video says someone nominated her from the floor, and she had to run out and decline.

No possibility existed in her mind that someone who knew her might think to nominate her, or that someone might have known some people he thought would be good nominees and pass out his own list.

And of course, for those who argue conspiracy (as you seem to be doing here), there is nothing in any video I’ve seen that precludes these fake lists actually being from the Ron Paul campaign, which they then report as being from other campaigns in order to cause trouble and get sympathy.

Of course, anybody can do anything at a convention, so it is possible that someone who wanted Romney to win, and who had heard about previous Paul lists at earlier conventions, might have decided to try payback. What is most unlikely is that Romney, having actually won the Nevada delegate votes, and therefore not needing to care about who actually went to the convention, would actually sanction fake lists, and then do it so badly that he lost the delegate fight anyway.

First, I do agree with you that Virginia’s rules leading to eliminating viable national candidates in a presidential primary are ill-conceived and should be abolished. I even wrote an article about that, and sent it to all my representative contacts in government to try to get them to pass emergency legislation to get people back on the ballot.

But having a rule that shouldn’t be used is a different matter than claiming that there was a plot to keep people off the ballot. I know some of the players in our party organization, and they are all honorable men and women who worked hard to get republicans elected, and I don’t like seeing them smeared with baseless charges of malfeasance.

For example, you are completely wrong about your assertion that the “rules were changed”. The rules about the number of valid signatures have been in place for a long time. 10,000 valid signatures from registered voters, with 400 from each congressional district.

The “15,000” number isn’t a rule, it was part of the procedure for verifying the 10,000 signature rule. The RNC had gotten beat up (a court case) for not taking sufficient steps to verify signatures. In response, the new chair wrote up a procedure to be used.

In that procedure, noting that we have never found more than 33% of the signatures on a petition were faulty, it was decided that if you submitted 50% more signatures than needed, the counters would not do a signature-by-signature verification. Note that there is a presumption that people hwo are actually running for PResident of the United States, and being seriously considered for the position, wouldn’t actually stoop to widespread forging of signatures.

So, if you managed to submit more than 15,000 total signatures, the signatures were counted (with a cursory check that addresses were given), and if you also had 600 signatures from each congressional district, they presumed that 10,000 of your total would be found valid.

Ron Paul actually submitted 14,100 signatures. So every one of his signatures was checked. And he came in above the 10,000 mark — another case where a detailed check didn’t eliminate more than 33% of the count.

Heck, we assumed that Perry had enough, except too many of his didn’t even have addresses, and too many weren’t registered voters. Gingrich was on the edge, and then it turned out he hired people to collect signatures, and one of them DID forge signatures (note it wasn’t the campaign, and Gingrich reported the forgery — showing that a candidate is unlikely to forge signatures on their own accord).

As to the “rediculous nuances” — what are they? They do require a standard form, and each signature has to be witnessed, and each page notarized. It’s a bit tedious, but they do seem to have eliminated some of the more annoying rules like requiring signatures to be separated by county.

The same 10,000-signature rule existed in 2008, and most candidates were able to meet the number. I collected signatures for a couple of them; Fred Thompson made the ballot OK. Of course, the candidates all seemed to get the party apparatus involved, unlike this time around.

Again, I agree with you about the ballot. Signature rules are intended to keep frivoulous candidates off your ballot, by making candidates show they have some level of support in the state.

But in a federal election, there are other ways to show that a candidate is serious, even if they don’t have a good organization within a state. Virginia couldn’t eliminate candidates from the primary, all they could do is prevent Virginians from being able to VOTE for candidates — that was what is wrong with the process.

“I watched one of the Maine videos that supposedly “showed” this. They had a “similar delegate list” which didn’t mention Ron Paul anywhere, and which followed a standard form for delegate lists, and happened to start with the Governor like Ron Paul’s list did. Because it was in the same “format” the video asserted it was a trick. Oddly, the Ron Paul list didn’t mention Ron Paul anywhere — which some would say was itself a trick to not let people know who the delegates were supporting.”

I’m not sure why you continue to resist me on this. This level of apologetics for Romney is definitely undeserved. You aren’t looking hard enough and I am not aware of any delegate slates that were captured on photo or video that were ambiguous. There were two slates. Both of them with the Ron Paul logo. That is not disputable. One with Ron Paul’s delegates, the other with Mitt Romney delegates and a few misspelled Ron Paul delegates who were likely the better known. It’s pretty clear. You cannot dispute this. I even saw this on live video from what one of the Paulbots who were streaming the caucus.

This link has a photograph as an example: http://www.dailypaul.com/231180/romney-camp-distributes-fake-ron-paul-delegate-slate-at-nevada-convention-cnn-censored

I have seen several, none are ambiguous, and none match your description, so I have no idea what you’re looking at. Maybe you’re reading or watching something from a few months ago.

“In that procedure, noting that we have never found more than 33% of the signatures on a petition were faulty, it was decided that if you submitted 50% more signatures than needed, the counters would not do a signature-by-signature verification. Note that there is a presumption that people hwo are actually running for PResident of the United States, and being seriously considered for the position, wouldn’t actually stoop to widespread forging of signatures.

You’re singing a different tune than you were earlier. So they (the rules) really weren’t the same for years and years like you suggested. You also reveal that it certainly isn’t an uncomplicated affair. The fact is the rules were changed in November or December, and they were rules that were much harder to comply with. Had they not been changed, or if the verification procedures had not been changed, there would have been no way for any of the other candidates to fail to get on the ballot. The fact that only two men, one supported by the GOPe and the other who had no chance of winning, is certainly evidence of major dysfunction in that state of yours. Even Mark Levin realized it was party shenanigans going on. If it isn’t corruption, it’s certainly incompetence in the State GOP of Virginia.

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