Thread: Cruz Confronted by Upset Trump Supporter: ‘How Can You Have Delegates Without a Vote?

POSTED APRIL 25, 2016 AT 8:40 PM BY OLIVER DARCY

A Donald Trump supporter confronted Ted Cruz Monday, asking the Texas senator how he can “justify” his strategy to win the support of unbound delegates.

“We haven’t even voted at a local level yet, so how can you justify that and how can you say you aren’t the establishment candidate?” Kathy Hiel asked Cruz at a campaign stop outside an Indiana ice cream shop.

“In Colorado, 65,000 people voted,” Cruz replied. “The people that voted are the grassroots activists, the exact opposite of the establishment.”

Since Cruz swept all the delegates in Colorado, Trump has criticized the system and argued that it is “rigged.” The Cruz campaign has maintained it is simply following the rules everyone agreed to and that Trump is only unhappy because the outcome was unfavorable to him.

Hiel asked if Colorado or Wyoming was the state where “no vote was ever cast.”

“The problem was that Donald Trump and his campaign said no vote was cast in Colorado, 65,000 people voted,” Cruz said.

“Indiana has no votes cast and we have our delegates chosen to the national committee still,” Hiel said. “[H]ow can you have delegates without a vote?”

Cruz told Hiel that “every state sets up different rules” and that he doesn’t control them, but contended that he has fought the establishment “every day” of his political career.

According to ABC News, the exchange ended when Hiel said Cruz isn’t a natural-born citizen. She later identified herself as a Trump supporter and told the outlet that Cruz should “step out” of the race.

Cruz Confronted by Upset Trump Supporter: ‘How Can You Have Delegates Without a Vote?’

Bill to restore Colorado presidential primary is before lawmakers

Measure would allow unaffiliated voters into the 2020 party-nominee process
By Joey Bunch
The Denver Post
Posted: 04/25/2016 10:26:50 AM MDT37 Comments
Updated: 04/26/2016 02:55:02 AM MDT

Legislation to restore a presidential primary in Colorado passed its first committee hurdle Monday, as lawmakers race to get it done by the end of the session May 11.

House Bill 1454 would allow every voter — even those registered as unaffiliated with a party — to cast a mail ballot in a presidential primary in 2020. Coloradans would have their first presidential primary since 2000, before the state returned to the caucus system in 2004.

The House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee voted 5-4 along party lines, with Republicans in opposition.

Under the bill, unaffiliated voters would pick which party's ballot they wish to receive, then that temporary affiliation would go away 30 days after the vote.

"My members have overwhelmingly told me they want a presidential primary," said Steve House, chairman of the state Republican Party, stressing it opposes open primaries and would retain the caucus for local races and delegates.

A group called Let Colorado Vote is proposing a ballot initiative to allow unaffiliated voters to vote in every race and receive ballots from major parties.

"I think the proposed system is infinitely better than the system that has gone through my office during the ballot-title setting that would involve sending everyone multiple ballots," said Secretary of State Wayne Williams.

Republican Reps. Justin Everett of Littleton and Patrick Neville of Castle Rock said the bill aimed at appeasing special interests behind the ballot initiative.

The measure maintains the current caucus system to select delegates to the national conventions for both parties.

The delegates are awarded to the candidates according to national party rules, either proportionally based on the vote or winner take all, largely depending on when the primary is held. The delegates are bound to the candidate on the first ballot only.

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, @joeybunch

http://www.denverpost.com/election/c...fore-lawmakers

GOP Official in CO Drops Delegate Bombshell… Trump to Get 2nd Chance?

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was not happy about the delegate-awarding process that took place in Colorado in early April.

The caucus, which gave Sen. Ted Cruz the entirety of the state’s 34 delegates, was operated a little differently than other primaries and caucuses, as it focused more on selecting delegates than the voters actually choosing a candidate.

Now, the chairwoman of the Boulder County GOP has revealed several errors that affected the state’s caucus, and she even mentioned the possibility of a “do-over.”

Chairwoman Peg Cage reportedly sent an email to other top Republican officials in Colorado, describing errors that led to “the perception of fraud,” according to Breitbart. The errors included mistakes such as names of candidates being left off some ballots, as well as some counties having too few or too many ballots.

Grave errors affected Colorado GOP caucus, Cruz "won" clean sweep of 34 delegates without opening up process to voting by citizens.
— slone (@slone) April 26, 2016

When Trump supporters in Colorado got wind of the inconsistencies, they protested the results on the steps of the state Capitol building.

“The Trump supporters think that the Cruz supporters stole the election,” Cage told Breitbart. “The Cruz supporters were very concerned that they might not get seated in Cleveland” so they have been publicizing that the Trump campaign does not plan to contest the results, she explained. But those delegates could still be un-seated by the Republican National Committee.

“If it’s that bad, I guess if there’s any question that our delegates won’t be seated, then that would be a case where it might make sense to have a do-over,” Cage said. “I would say it would. It might be the better way to go just to make sure that our delegates, they ought to be able to go forth and get seated.”

The chairwoman thought most of the errors were clerical and called the debacle “inexcusable.”

“It seemed to happen in all of the districts,” she said. “So I guess the state has something to do it because it was up to the state who received those forms … It just wasn’t clean … It wasn’t clean because of those clerical mistakes.”

Cage, who has nothing to gain by making this noise because she is a Cruz supporter, said she was simply concerned about the integrity of the electoral process.

No matter who one may support, selection of delegates should be "clean"
Colorado GOP, apparently, politically dirty. https://t.co/mAnCoDQ5DY
— Frank Laird (@eff_dblu_ell) April 26, 2016

The chairwoman listed several of those concerns in her email to fellow party chairs last Tuesday, including:

1. Many people who had filed their Intent to Run for National Delegate forms were not put on a ballot.
2. Clerical errors created the perception of fraud (duplicate and omitted names and numbers)
3. Despite calls for unity by elected party officials, one candidate was perceived to have been favored
4. Ballot counting was perceived to have been done in secret, by the secretary of state (in his orange Cruz shirt) on equipment from the county where he was the County Clerk.

While Trump’s convention manager, Paul Manafort, has indicated that Trump would not contest Cruz’s delegate share, a “do-over” caucus could definitely shake things up in the state.

Could this primary get any more heated?

http://conservativetribune.com/break...fficial-in-co/

Colorado GOP Chair: We’re Not Redoing Our Primary Caucuses

KERRY PICKET
Reporter
5:07 PM 04/26/2016

Colorado Republican Chairman Steve House disputed any notion that the state party will be redoing its primary caucuses.

“No, absolutely not,” House told The Daily Caller.

“There was an article in Breitbart where the reporter was talking to one of our county chairs and he proposed a hypothetical to her and she took that hypothetical to answer the question which, I guess sounded like that, but no, there is no issue with how we did the caucus,” House said of a recent Breitbart story. “Yeah, there were clerical errors, but we handled every one of those clerical errors on the spot.”

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump called the caucus “voter-less,” though 65,000 registered Republicans in the Rocky Mountain state cast votes for convention delegates in early March. Trump lost all the delegates to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at the convention.

“We even looked where there was a clerical error and if it would have made an impact and if it would have changed [anything] with the delegates, and no, it wasn’t even a close race between delegates,” House explained.

The Colorado GOP decided to drop its statewide presidential preference contest back in August, as a result of the Republican National Committee changing the rules in 2012, which demanded that any state with a preference contest or “straw poll” must bind its delegates to the result of that contest on at least the first ballot at the convention.

The Colorado GOP preferred to keep its delegates unbound on the first ballot and decided to drop its straw poll, so that its delegation could be seated at the next convention.

A bill is currently before Colorado state lawmakers to restore the statewide GOP straw poll for the 2020 election. The measure would allow non-Republicans to vote in the state primary.

Follow Kerry on Twitter


http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/26/co...#ixzz474oNT4XD