West Virginia has a very convoluted voting process.
Let’s pretend you live in Logan County WV
Here is your sample ballot
The three RNC members are bound for the statewide winner (Trump)
Each of the 3 congressional districts get 3 delegates.
The remainder are in a statewide free for all, where nobody knows who they are voting for. Delegate candidates had to indicate the candidate they support. Every voter in the state gets to vote for all delegates. Each voter chooses 22 delegates. Because Trump has more than 22 candidates, he could end up losing delegates because Trump supporters wouldn’t all vote for the same 22 people.
The top vote getters become the delegates, but no more than 2 from each county, except the #1 vote getter is excluded from that restriction.
The WV Republican Party has declared that delegate candidates who aligned with candidates that have withdrawn are released from their obligation.
Reform of the primary process should be at the top of the Trump agenda.
A page right out of “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” where the aliens were about to destroy earth as part of a new infrastructure construction project and they needed to apply eminent domain for the project. When the aliens showed up to begin the destruction the earthlings were shocked and upset but politely informed that there were a number of hearings on a nearby planet, but no one from earth showed up and objected.
The party officials control their jobs first, and once someone takes over the party, they tend to create more barriers rather than less… to plug the hole they found and took advantage of so that no one else can. In some governments, there is just a direct yes or no vote on whether the voter wants to see change or not.
DON’T PANIC !!! ?
Well – have you ever spent time in WV? I am not surprised in the slightest. The political machinations in WV are something to behold. WV is responsible for Senator Byrd – Imperial Kleagle of the KKK and Senator for some 50 years I think.
I have many fond memories of West Virginia – it is hard to go South from Pittsburgh without going through WV. I spent many a night as a child riding Greyhound buses climbing over mountains in the middle of the night, and experiencing the thrill of the two lane tunnels on the West Virginia Turnpike.
After the New River bridge and I-77 were built, it became a manageable one day trip, albeit without as much exposure to the West Virginia culture. John Denver is still as revered as the Beatles are to the rest of the world
There are many pretty locations in WV to be sure. And – if you are a rock climber – this is close the Heaven. I don’t know why politics are as much a mess there as a third world country, but they are. Robert Byrd is the poster child for dysfunctional politics (I guess that should be “was”). Beckley is a decent city although I know WV from visiting the power plants along the rivers and that is just “down home” USA.
When Virginia held its referendum on whether to secede from the United States, people who opposed the war and wanted to avoid the conflict fled to the mountains.
http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh30-1.html
The questionable acceptance of West Virginia as a state is conveniently ignored in all history courses and textbooks that I ever endured in high school and college (I have a degree in American history). [Props to the state of West Virginia for publishing the article you linked]. Personally, I think this coverup in our educational system is because the secession of West Virginia from Virginia and it’s welcome as one of the united States undermines many of the arguments in favor of the Union side in the war. Lincoln brilliantly manipulated the headlines by refusing to withdraw troops from Ft Sumter even after the Federal government had complied with removing their garrisons from all other bases in seceding states. By refusing to abandon Ft Sumter then S. Carolina had no choice but to ‘fire the first shot’ and could then be painted as the aggressor. Thus the door was open to launch an invasion of the seceding states who had ‘bombed Ft Sumter’. The sticky wicket is that if secession is illegal (and that the union is ‘indivisible’ as Lincoln believed as we all now pledge), then West Virginia should never have been accepted as a state since it seceded from Virginia. Or at the very least, they should have been kept as ‘neutral territory’ for the duration of the war and then restored to Virginia when the war ended.
Don’t touch the Jacksons or the Ten-spots;
Fivers are the where Tubman would be hot!
I’ve heard that when the shots were fired, the only people inside the fort were a caretaker and a horse.
The passage of the post war amendments were equally problematic. The first step was the Southern States agreeing to a change that would prohibit the legislators from holding office. If the states were excluded from the required number for passage, that was confirming the states could secede. If the states were included, the post war amendments would never pass.
Part of the solution was to admit Nevada as a new state, despite it not meeting the population requirement for statehood