CLEVELAND — When Washington, D.C., Republicans voted for their party’s presidential nominee in March, Donald Trump received less than 14 percent of the vote, trailing Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. John Kasich by over 20 points.
Based on these results, the D.C. delegation announced on the convention floor during the Republican National Convention’s nominating process that 10 delegates were duty bound to vote for Rubio and nine were bound to vote for Kasich.
But the convention secretary promptly awarded all 19 delegates to Trump.
How could Trump win less than 14 percent of the vote and end up with 100 percent of the delegates?
The D.C. Republican Party’s official rules note that regardless of all other rules regarding binding, “if only one candidate’s name is placed in nomination at the Republican National Convention, all delegates shall be bound to vote for such candidate on the first ballot provided that the candidate received votes in the D.C. presidential preference poll.”
So, because Trump was the only candidate placed in nomination at the convention and because he received some votes in DC, all of the delegates were diverted to Trump.
However, the story doesn’t fully end there. The D.C. delegation said they thought they had worked something out that would allow their votes to be cast in accordance with the popular will of D.C.
“We thought we had them waived,” Bob Kabel, national committeeman from D.C. who served on the convention rules committee. “We thought we had an agreement.”
He said they supported the binding rules in the rules committee because they thought that doing so actually bound their delegates to Rubio and Kasich.
