Friday, March 5, 2021

Parking Lot Convention OUT; Unit Committees Take Over?

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Parking Lot Convention OUT; Unit Committees Take Over?

Best way to organize the convention? Do it by unit committee (of course).

Shaun Kenney

Mar 5

Liberty University’s decision to decline the parking lot convention is being spun as if the Republican Party of Virginia is still in the driver’s seat — but it’s not (and we all know this).

So what’s next?

Far be it from me to propose elegant solutions to difficult problems, but seeing as the unit committees are going to have to organize in order to select delegates? Why not also allow each one of them to tally votes in an unassembled convention as well?

Unit committees will gather to select delegates. They have to in order to select delegates qualified to attend the convention anyway.
Keep the delegate ratio as high as possible. This can be established by the rules committee to ensure that no one is turned away because of volume.
Approve of your slate of delegates to the RPV State Convention. Done deal. Candidate can then target delegates to their hearts content and create videos before the convention itself.
Four weeks later, conduct the RPV State Convention. Delegates will then reassemble at the unit committee level with their chairman and executive committee serving just as they would otherwise. No speeches, just the vote. Delegates will vote, the ranked choice ballots will be tallied by MS Excel spreadsheet, and the tally will then be certified by the chairman and executive committee (with observers from the campaigns) and sent to Chris Marston at RPV.
RPV tallies the ranked choice balloting.
RPV announces the winner at 8:00am the next day.
Beat McAuliffe.

If we can’t do that successfully, then we don’t deserve to run the commonwealth.

Meanwhile, RPV should charge $50,000 per candidate for filing fees for the convention. No whining; just do it.

RPV should also immediately hire a state co-ordinator (like we did in 2014) to oversee this process and communicate with unit chairs, while offering voluntary dues to RPV delegates ($9/mo?) in order to finance the grassroots machinery we are going to desperately require for the rest of the year.

Either that, or we can keep arguing for another month and let State Central pick our nominee.

Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.