Ted Cruz continued his dominance in Colorado on Saturday, winning all of the final 13 delegates to the Republican National Convention available at the state’s convention.

The Texas senator has now won all 34 delegates up for grabs in the state and is now fewer than 200 delegates behind Donald Trump in the race to the 1,237 needed to clinch the Republican nomination.

The final 13 came in a marathon sitting in a hockey arena where nearly 4,000 delegates spent their Saturday listening to dozens of speeches from various candidates for elected office. The process culminated when all 600 delegates to the national convention got the chance to speak for 10 seconds to the assembled crowd. They lined up all the way down the arena for their chance to shout brief elevator pitches into the microphone such as: “the only person better to be president than Ted Cruz is Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is not a natural born citizen”, or “Donald Trump! Buy Colorado weed!”

Cruz had been organizing in the state since 2015. Representative Ken Buck, Cruz’s state chair, told the Guardian how “dozens and dozens of volunteers lined up to help Ted Cruz and push people to caucuses, got people elected to county assemblies and on to the state assembly”. The only candidate to have organized in the state in a serious way was Marco Rubio and Buck noted that the fact the race had become a one-on-one battle between Trump and Cruz “helped voters to make up their minds”.

Trump’s campaign hired its state director earlier this week and believed that even earning a single delegate in Colorado would have been a pleasant surprise.

The voting took place on large scantron sheets where attendees got up to 26 votes for the 13 delegate and 13 alternates to Cleveland. They would bubble in circles next to a corresponding number for each delegate and each campaign handed out slate cards so voters could see the appropriate numbers for their chosen delegates. The haphazard nature of this was revealed when the results took over four hours to count because many attendees cast more than 26 votes on their ballot.

Cruz, who was the only candidate to speak at the convention, even had his slate displayed behind him on a giant screen while he spoke on stage.

Ted Cruz campaign buttons for sale. Photograph: Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump campaign’s lack of organization in the state was amplified by making basic mistakes. The New York Republican’s campaign put out sample ballots featuring wrong numbers. The campaign first put out a sample ballot with wrong numbers for seven delegates. That was corrected, but there were still four numbers wrong.

One of the four uncorrected errors could have led Trump voters to cast their ballots for a candidate who is in fact pledged to support Cruz. The resulting miscues meant that one candidate for a Trump delegate used his 10 seconds on stage to urge attendees to “read the names on the ticket. A third of the numbers have been changed”.

Alan Cobb, a top operative from the campaign, told the Guardian “our numbers were correct at the time of printing” and suggested the issue lay with the state party making constant revisions to the delegate order.

He noted though that “it’s unlikely to make any difference in the final result”. A state party spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

This misstep followed a congressional district convention on Thursday, the Trump campaign handed out slate cards that featured two candidates who were not listed on the ballot.

In contrast, both Kasich and Cruz had every number on their respective slates correct. Cruz had a vibrant effort with volunteers in orange T-shirts blanketing the arena. Each shirt had the Cruz slate printed in full on the back. Kasich, dealing with a very conservative electorate at the state convention, had slate cards printed both as the official Kasich slate as well as “an open convention slate”, committed only to picking the “best nominee to unite the party”. Despite getting shut out on Saturday, the Kasich campaign is still having conversations with Cruz delegates in the state in hopes of persuading them to consider the Ohio governor.

Ted Cruz greets supporters at the Colorado Republican state convention. Photograph: Rick Wilking/Reuters

In other delegate contests on Saturday, Cruz earned almost every delegate for grabs in Iowa’s four congressional district conventions and edged out Trump in the convention in Virginia’s ninth congressional district. In Iowa, the Trump campaign had only urged supporters to attend the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses on 1 February and had made no attempt to encourage Trump supporters to be involved in electing delegates. The result left the real estate mogul reeling in a state that he finished in a close second to Cruz. AJ Spiker, a former state party chair in Iowa who organized a successful effort by Ron Paul to win delegates there in 2012, slammed Trump’s efforts in the state. “Trump’s convention strategy in Iowa was a complete failure,” said Spiker. “This is something he should have been preparing for in 2015 and it looks like something put together in the last 48 hours.” In Virginia, Cruz won two delegates to Trump’s one in an area where Trump won 47% of the vote in the state’s 1 March primary.

These results will not matter on a first ballot in July where delegates will be bound by results in Iowa and Virginia’s nominating contests. However, if the convention goes to a second ballot or beyond, delegates become unbound, which gives Cruz a significant advantage in a contested convention.

Cruz though fell short in maneuvering in Michigan, where Wolverine state Republicans held their state convention on Saturday. Trump and Kasich were able to combine to win key slots on the rules committee and credentials committee and elect all the delegates they earned in the state’s March primary. In a statement, Brian Jack, the national delegate director for the Trump campaign, said: “This was a big win for team Trump. We won 25 delegates from Michigan last month, and now, at least 25 supporters of Mr Trump will be delegates to the Republican National Convention.”

Trump has 743 of the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot. He needs to win just over 60% of the remaining delegates in order to avoid a potential second ballot and contested convention.