The Michigan Republican Party has gotten itself into one hell of a mess with its post-partum declaration that Mitt Romney won the delegate count in Michigan and that assumptions of a 15-15 tie with Rick Santorum were wrong.
The decision was made nearly two days after the primary election by an obscure GOP committee consisting of six people.
The response from the Santorum camp has been ferocious: “delegate scandal,” “backroom power grab.”
To be fair, this was most likely an example of incompetence not infidelity to vote-counting practices. And it was not simply a botched attempt to count to 30. But that hasn’t stopped Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer from having a field day with this fiasco.
“Establishment and elite Michigan Republicans will stop at nothing to protect their candidate, Mitt Romney,” Brewer said. “They manipulated the rules in 1988 to deny Pat Robertson his fair share of delegates and now they’re doing the same thing to Rick Santorum.”
“Why do these errors keep happening?” Brewer added. “Don’t they remember their own disastrous state convention in 2010 when they ran out of ballots and there were vote-counting errors?”
Expect the Santorum camp to say similar things today at a press conference in Troy that was slated to blast the party’s decision.
Essentially, the dispute comes down to this: Beyond the 14 delegates won by each of the candidates based on their wins/losses in the state’s congressional districts, the party awarded two additional delegates based on statewide results.
Party rules said those two delegates would be decided on a proportional basis. Because the statewide vote was so close, that rule would mean splitting them, one each, between Romney and Santorum.
But the state GOP Credentials Committee declared late on Wednesday night that they were reaffirming a process that they had already established on Feb. 4. So, they voted 4-2 to confirm that the two additional delegates go to the winner of the popular vote. They claim the intent all along was a winner-take-all prize, not a proportional allocation, with regard to those two delegates.
Of course, many average voters would see this as much ado about nothing. Romney had the most votes so he deserves a majority of the delegates.
But there’s more to this. There is a definite pattern here.
Romney “won” Iowa until two weeks later it was determined that Santorum won. In Nevada it took two days to count 28,000 votes, a process which left a long trail of questions about the ballot-counting process. Officially, Romney won.
In Maine, after a series of errors, we still don’t know for sure who the victor was. No need to worry. The party gave the victory to Romney.
And now, in Michigan, 1 and 1 equals … 1?
