The MI GOP, which believed it could guarantee a win for Mitt Romney but produced only a delegate tie, voted to ignore the election results and give Romney the win anyway.
Michigan’s two at-large delegates to the Republican National convention will be awarded to Michigan native Mitt Romney, following a vote last night by the state party’s credentials’ committee.
The vote came despite the party’s rules that the two at-large delegates are supposed to be awarded on a proportional basis based on the statewide popular vote. Romney won the statewide vote by a 41% to 38% margin over former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
[snip]
As a result, Romney gets 16 delegates and Santorum 14.
The move comes the day after a Romney supporter said that Rick Santorum should give back the delegates he won because Democrats crossed over to support him.
“[Santorum] cheated by asking people who would never vote for him for president to vote for him in the Republican primary,” Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said on a call with reporters. “I believe that he should agree to give back a percentage of the delegates that he won in the Republican primary with Democrat votes that would never support him for president.”
I need to figure out what the precise results for CDs were, but I would bet that the 2 delegate swing to Romney would effectively do precisely what Turner demanded: given Romney as many delegates as he would have gotten if Dems hadn’t crossed over.
So I think the MDP should bill Mitt $5 million. After all, all taxpayers in the state paid for Tuesday’s primary (I believe, but need to double check, that the cost was $10 million). The GOP even invited us Democrats to vote in their primary. So our votes should count. (FWIW, I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Santorum; I voted for Fred Karger.)
And yet, the GOP have just held a private vote to invalidate our votes.
But Mitt has plenty of personal money to pay back the state for half the primary cost. And at $2.5 million per extra delegate, it’s not all that unreasonable a cost given what Mitt has paid elsewhere!