CLEVELAND (Sputnik) — The change in the rules would have allowed delegates to "vote their conscience" and not for Donald Trump. The states that petitioned for the roll-call vote were Minnesota, Iowa, Washington, Colorado, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Alaska, Virginia, Utah, Maine, and Wyoming.
"I had reports that we had 11 states, and for whatever reason out there they said they had only nine. So I’m not sure if they threw them out and disqualified two states," Godinez said of a showdown vote at the Republican convention on Monday.
The change in the rules would have allowed delegates to "vote their conscience" and not for Donald Trump. The states that petitioned for the roll-call vote were Minnesota, Iowa, Washington, Colorado, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Alaska, Virginia, Utah, Maine, and Wyoming.
Earlier on Monday, Rules Committee chairman Congressman Steve Womack declared there would be no change to the rules governing the convention.
"We were railroaded," Godinez said. "They had committee chairs in multiple states pulling them [delegates] off the floor and whipping them to take their vote off."
The majority of the Iowa delegation demanded the roll-call vote not to oppose Donald Trump, Godinez said, but to demonstrate the power of the grassroots of the Party over the Republican establishment.
Last week, a small faction of anti-Trump delegates demanded that delegates be unbound from voting for Trump. The measure was defeated at the time and received a second defeat on the floor of the RNC on Monday. The roll-call vote would not have directly affected the Convention rules, only registered the dissent of delegates.
