This morning I wrote about an issue in the selection process of the NDGOP’s delegates to the national RNC convention for selecting the president.
The delegates nominated before the convention were mostly Romney supporters, despite Romney taking third in the statewide caucus vote to Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.
This morning the convention took up the business of confirming the national delegates, but there was a significant amount of push back from Santorum and Paul supporters on the floor. They nominated their own delegates from the floor, and when they asked Chairman Stan Stein to use a ballot to select the final delegates that made no distinction between pre-selected delegates and delegates nominated from the floor, Chairman Stein lost his cool and denied the request.
The convention then dissolved into a parliamentary slug fest between the Santorum/Paul supporters on the floor and the party leadership on the stage.
What’s frustrating is that there was clearly an effort by party leadership to ram-rod delegates for Romney through the convention, in contradiction to the outcome of the caucus vote. It was a pretty shameful proceeding. The convention leadership held voice votes and hand votes from the floor, but there was no real effort made to tabulate vote accurately.