Questions about Republican Delegates

[sylvania]

I understand that as many Ron Paul supporters as possible need to start looking into how to become delegates as soon as possible and then attend the Republican convention held in St. Paul, Minnesota Sept 1-4, 2008. But I have a few questions someone might know the answers to.

(I have been reading the info on this site:
http://www3.webng.com/ronpaul/becomedelegate.html)

1) How are delegates determined to be "delegates not bound"? This seems pretty important to me, because delegates not bound can vote for whom they like since they are not bound to a precinct/district's winner.

2) There are 2,488 delegates that attend the convention:
Of those, the states get 1,605 – 3 per each senator and congressional member and another 50 got to the various territories. How are the rest divided up? At the bottom of the page there is some more info but my numbers still didn't come out.

3) Does anyone know which state has how many of the bonus delegates? Is that information anywhere?

4) I assume our vote is made public so that if we don't vote for the candidate our precinct/district chose, we would be sent packing and the alternate delegate would take our place. Is this correct?

[Bradley in DC]

I understand that as many Ron Paul supporters as possible need to start looking into how to become delegates as soon as possible and then attend the Republican convention held in St. Paul, Minnesota Sept 1-4, 2008. But I have a few questions someone might know the answers to.

(I have been reading the info on this site:
http://www3.webng.com/ronpaul/becomedelegate.html)

1) How are delegates determined to be "delegates not bound"? This seems pretty important to me, because delegates not bound can vote for whom they like since they are not bound to a precinct/district's winner.

2) There are 2,488 delegates that attend the convention:
Of those, the states get 1,605 – 3 per each senator and congressional member and another 50 got to the various territories. How are the rest divided up? At the bottom of the page there is some more info but my numbers still didn't come out.

3) Does anyone know which state has how many of the bonus delegates? Is that information anywhere?

4) I assume our vote is made public so that if we don't vote for the candidate our precinct/district chose, we would be sent packing and the alternate delegate would take our place. Is this correct?

Hi,

The guy running the site you link to does not know what he's talking about, to be nice. The campaign is NOT urging followers to hide their support (in fact, state election law requires the campaigns to file their slate of "delegate candidates"--notice the proper vocabulary not found on Anson's site--with the state Secretary of State which become public record; in fact, in many states, the "delegate candidates" are listed on the ballot (so much for Anson's "stealth" approach).

1) State election law determines if a delegate is bound or not and for how many ballots and under what conditions they may be "released" by their candidate.

2) Um, not exactly, but if you're using Anson's site, we'll cut you some slack. The RNC has rules determining the formulae for allocation of delegates by state. Each Congressional District gets three delegates to the presidential nominating convention.

3) These two sites have the best information:

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P08/

http://www.republicansource.com/primaries.htm

4) Processes are different in different states. The Green Papers and Republican Source sites have good information (unlike Anson's). Generally, primary balloting is anonymous unlike in caucus states (rules vary considerably among the states).

Another Ron Paul supporter (only this one has a clue) has a site here that offers the best information for our side for a popular audience:

http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/introductory_pageread_fir.html

on the left hand column you can find groups of state information under "Strategy Primer"

[sylvania]

Thank you. I'm new to all of this.