The Maine caucuses are now the second Republican contest this year to have a result initially called for Mitt Romney, only to be brought into question.
The state GOP announced Thursday that they are “reconfirming” the results with county chairs –Â and that they will open up the results to include Washington County, a rural county that had postponed its voting due to a snowstorm, which will now caucus on Saturday. In an interview with Politico, Maine GOP chairman Charlie Webster said that some of the e-mailed vote results on from the caucuses may have been sent to the party’s “spam” folder and thus not counted.
Since last weekend, when the state GOP announced that Romney edged out Ron Paul by a mere 194 votes, Ron Paul supporters have been complaining:
We were robbed! So were they robbed? And if either he or Mitt Romney win, what is the actual effect on the key metric in this nomination contest — delegates?
This all follows the debacle in Iowa, where the state GOP chairman declared Romney the winner on caucus night by an 8-vote margin — only for revisions and corrections of the spreadsheet in the next two weeks to reveal that Rick Santorum was the winner. The state party then initially posted the totals, but did not declare an actual winner, only to back down and declare Santorum the victor. The state chairman later resigned.
In the certified Maine totals, there are 5,585 votes, with Romney at 2,190 votes for 39%, and Ron Paul at 1,996 votes for 36%.
However, the Bangor Daily News reported on Tuesday that more errors were being found in the certified figures:
Waldo County GOP Chairman Raymond St. Onge said the results were sent to the state party on Tuesday, Feb. 7. He said those results probably would not have changed the outcome but was disheartened the votes were not included.
St. Onge said he spoke to party officials late Tuesday about why Waldo County’s results were omitted.
“They said it was a clerical error,” St. Onge said. “I’m going to believe them because there were other errors that occurred. I don’t think it was intentional because our results wouldn’t have changed the winner.”
The single biggest issue was in Washington County, where just one small town voted, and the entire rest of the county didn’t vote at all due to unsafe road conditions. (That small town gave five votes to Paul, zero to Romney, three to Gingrich and two to Santorum, and is included in the official totals.)
County GOP chairman Chris Gardiner, who for his part has actually endorsed Romney, has vowed to hold the county caucuses this weekend. “I would just say that we certainly are going to proceed, we are going to have our straw poll,” he told TPM earlier this week. “We are going to have our votes counted and heard, and I trust that when the state party has the opportunity to have the arguments heard, they will make the right decision.”
But will it actually change the result? And more importantly, do the caucus presidential polls actually matter at all, beyond bragging rights for a candidate?
“What happened on February 11th is we held a beauty contest, plain and simple,” Webster told TPM earlier this week.
He explained “Under Maine law, the towns and municipalities in Maine are allowed to caucus up until March 20. The governing body of the state party, they wrote in October, to ask all the towns in the state to actually caucus between the 4th and 11th, and we would announce on the 11th at 5 o’clock who has the most votes. We asked that they call in their numbers before 5 o’clock, if they want to be counted.”
Webster also pointed out that the county’s vote may not ultimately change the state result –Â in 2008, there were only 113 votes there, of which Ron Paul got 8, John McCain about 50, and Mitt Romney about 40. This compares to Romney’s current 194-vote statewide margin, nearly double the 2008 votes in the county caucuses, making it unlikely that Ron Paul could pick up the votes there.
And in fact, the caucus votes by themselves have no effect on the state’s 23 elected delegates to the national convention (plus Webster as state chairman, making 24). Those delegates will be elected at the state party convention in May, as individuals listed on a ballot. That ballot itself does not expressly state any of the delegate-candidates’ own preference for the nomination — and the ballot will also contain the names of such party luminaries as the governor, the state’s U.S. senators, etc.
The question then, is the extent to which the straw poll results are indicative of a county’s vote for its state delegates, and whether the people who have been elected as state delegates had a preference for a presidential candidate that is reflected in the local straw-poll results.
Even if the caucus vote totals were not being amended to include Washington County, the county would still be represented at the state convention, with as much delegate strength as their numbers entitle them to have, under a formula based on the state’s Republican vote for governor in the previous election.
As a result, the county was not being disenfranchised in the actual contest of delegates — but who knows, it may just trigger a big shift in the bragging rights.
