First the Mitt Romney camp cheated. They cheated in Maine. they cheated in Nevada. They cheated in Oklahoma, they cheated in Iowa, they cheated in Louisiana. But it still wasn’t enough to stop Ron Paul who has the popular support of the country. They broke bones, turned out lights, canceled conventions, anything they could as soon as Ron Paul started to win. In Louisiana the entire convention turned their chairs around away from the GOP when they wouldn’t follow their own rules. They had a legal legitimate election but the GOP ruled they didn’t matter. The GOP also recently ruled that even after cheating the numbers and still losing the Maine vote, that the Maine vote does not mattter and they are throwing out the delegates from Maine to elect Romney insiders instead. Because with five states STILL voting for Paul after all the cheating, they could not prevent Ron Paul from being nominated. And if he makes it into nomination there’s no telling what would happen. Instead, they chose to simply cheat and with one stroke of their pen they pronounced “All Maine Duly Elected Delegates are Hereby Thrown Out”.

This is outrageous and is something that one would expect in North Vietnam not America.

Additionally they will not follow rule 13 which will requires the remaining five delegates to vote on who to seat in Tampa. Governer of Main Paul LePage is so furious over this he has walked out of the convention. And the convention hasn’t even started yet!

[picture of the hearing on Maine Delegates]

And it gets better. To make sure that Ron Paul cannot in any way shape or form be nominated, they recently changed the rules to require that anyone being nominated submit notarized statements with more than half the delegates of a state signing it. That would be fine if the vote were held wednesday as is traditional, but they have ALSO moved the vote up to Monday. That means that TODAY aka immediately, all states have to organize even though they have never met as a group yet because the convention has yet to start, and make their nomination in writing, get it notarized, all before they ever meet. Of course they could try to bring a notary into the convention Monday but you can as sure bet that all Notaries will be thrown out and they will keep to a “delegates only” rule. In short, the whole thing is impossible. It’s a farce. They also tried to pass a “you must be nominated by ten states instead of five” rule but it failed by one vote.

Wait, it gets even better. The Republican National Convention Committee passed a new law to make the popular (aka rigged electronic voting machine) vote impossible to be overturned by the delegate vote, as Ron Paul supporters did in Iowa and Nevada. Now all future GOP elections will be fully rigged and there will be no more of this nonsense that the people have to be heard. But still feeling insecure, Romney pushed to be able to change ANY RULE at the drop of a hat as needed. The Republican National Convention Rules Committee voted 63-38 to approve a new rule allowing the RNC the power to amend the governing document of the GOP anytime they wish. “It’s definitely a power grab by the campaign, the committee, It’s bad juju. Once you let the genie out of the bottle they can do anything.” said South Carolina delegate Drew McKissick. Game over we now have tyranny.

I ask you this. If Romney can only win by cheating, who the heck wants him? Even devout Romney supporters should be questioning the shenanigans at this point. It’s one thing to have a few pranks and push hard, it’s quite another to out and out cheat.

Well I know an old saying – Cheaters never win and Winners never cheat. Mitt Romney may have cheated and stolen the convention, but he will never win the race.

Finally here’s a letter from a Maine delegate who breaks down what happened:

–
by Jim Azzola

Let me tell you of my personal experiences at the Maine State Convention in 2012.

Given the backdrop of bullying, exclusion, ballot tampering, results filtering, fake slates, convention scuttling, shutting out, assault, head fakes and other maneuvers perpetrated on our people at many state conventions around the country, Maine’s was a relatively quiet, uncontroversial affair.

I witnessed the counting of ballots and personally counted ballots for the Cumberland County State Committee Members Election on Saturday evening. I worked side by side with Romney and Paul supporters on this count. We took our time to ensure a high quality result, reviewing any questions of voter intent, and I cannot say we encountered any irregularities which might raise a flag of suspicion.

Our enthusiastic people helped as much as they could in the months preceding the Convention by volunteering at the GOP office in Augusta to process the data deluge from hundreds of towns and thousands of delegates. To that extent we furthered the goals of the Convention.

Of course, the credentials process was an ill-planned disaster, creating confusion and delaying the start of the political process for hours on Saturday. The problem wasn’t with the handing out of pre-packaged badges, which ran smoothly. The problem came later with discrepancies, new delegates unknown to the GOP, mistakes previously made. I personally witnessed a single line snaking around in every direction, filled with two hundred people at a time. The Establishment turned what should have been a parallel process with properly trained staff into a serial process, a tailor made bottleneck.

Credentialing is not inherently a partisan process, in that it doesn’t favor one faction over the other. The Ron Paul campaign had nothing to do with the planning of the Convention credentialing process. If there were bad results, the Ron Paul campaign wasn’t responsible for them.

As to the charge that there lacked a necessary quorum to proceed on Day 2, Sunday? If a quorum wasn’t achieved at that time, it was because the vast majority of Team Romney didn’t bother attending after their disastrous showing on Day 1. On Sunday, I witnessed votes of approximately 1000+ to 100 in favor of Ron Paul candidates where on the previous day, especially for the election of Chairman, the vote was nearly equal in number. The question was raised, presumably by Romney state delegates, more than once, about the existence of a quorum. On Sunday, it was determined by Brent Tweed, Convention Chair, that a quorum was present. Thomas Balch, a Parliamentarian of unimpeachable qualifications, who co-wrote the latest edition of Robert’s Rules of Order, Revised, sent by the National GOP to oversee the Maine State Convention, was present advising the Convention Chair and Secretary at all times, implicitly acknowledging the validity of this determination.

We included Governor LePage and his wife as delegates on our slate because we wanted to show united support for his administration, despite partisan differences (the Governor and his wife are Romney supporters). I am happy the Governor supports Maine’s delegation.

Jan Staples and Peter Cianchette, both Romney supporters, who are bringing this delegate-resetting action, when asked why Governor LePage wasn’t excised from the delegate list as with every other delegate, responded that he would have been elected anyway. Instead, they could have reset the entire delegate roster, and proposed a new method to determine an appropriate group of delegates based on a non-partisan, democratic process, but even that fig leaf would have been embarrassing.

What does all this say if the decision is to negate the results of any state convention at will because of perceived irregularities? This is a low level criterion to employ for undermining the democratic process itself. After all, with a big enough microscope, one can discover irregularities in any large, complicated political contest pitting different interests together. If the National GOP decides to go this route and undermine the democrat process in Maine, what precedent has it set for future state conventions?

Here is their message: Don’t bother turning out if you’re going up against the Establishment, as they can zero out your efforts with the push of a button, on the pretense that irregularities occurred, whether under their watchful eye or not, whether by omission or commission.

If the National GOP decides to exclude the duly elected delegates of Maine, what does that say about the validity of the RNC itself?

The motivation behind this effort to unseat our delegates is transparent. It has nothing to do with the mechanics of how we elect our delegates, nothing to do with “cheating” or “irregularities” or any other questions of legal substance. It has everything to do with a partisan effort on the part of Team Romney to destroy the democratic process in order to stifle dissent, to marginalize our message and to curb our impact at the Republican National Convention and on the minds of the American people.

Jim Azzola
Cumberland County Coordinator
Maine Ron Paul Campaign
8/23/12