Paul Delegates White Full.jpg

Ed Rombach is a pretty normal guy. He lives in a modest shingled house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where his Pekingese, Zoe, has the run of his small front yard. His girls are grown. His Subaru wagon is immaculate, save for two sand-flecked beach chairs in the back, where he suggested I drop my pack. "We’re beach people," he told me on Monday as he opened the passenger door for me. Rombach is a Ron Paul supporter, a big one. But there was no Gadsden Flag flying in his yard, no sidearm worn in protest, and no stack of conspiracy theorist literature on the back seat of his car. In fact, the only thing at all on the back seat was a pristine white straw hat—a prop, as he called it, for the Republican National Convention in Tampa. If only the Romney campaign would let him go.

In April, Rombach and dozens of other Paul supporters ran for delegate at Massachusetts’s state-level caucuses, the gatherings where party faithful select the actual individuals who will travel to the national convention in August to represent the Bay State and officially choose a nominee. The Massachusetts primary was not close: home-state darling Mitt Romney pulled in 72 percent, while Ron Paul finished third with 10 percent. Because Romney was the only candidate to earn more than 15 percent of the vote, he gets all of the state’s delegates. But as enterprising Paul supporters in several states have discovered, that doesn’t mean that Paulites can’t run for—and win—those slots, so long as they pledge to vote for Romney on the first ballot. Rombach and his cohorts formed what they called the Liberty Slate, and wouldn’t you know it, they won 35 of the state’s 54 openings. In many cases they beat out party big shots like Kerry Healey, Romney’s lieutenant governor and an advisor on his campaign. Each of the Paul delegates had pledged to uphold the rules and vote for Romney on the first ballot.

All good, right? Americans getting involved in the process and following the rules to enliven and strengthen our democracy? Yes?

No. Several weeks after the caucuses, all of the winning Liberty Slate delegates got letters in the mail from the state Republican party, demanding they sign an enclosed affidavit, swearing "under pain and penalty of perjury" to vote for Romney at the convention. Signed, notarized copies were to be returned to party headquarters by a date and time certain. The Paulites didn’t like the smell of this: Mass GOP had never required an affidavit before, nor had anyone mentioned one at the caucuses. And the wording of the document seemed overly severe. What if Romney for some reason were to drop out before August? Would the Liberty Delegates then be perjuring themselves by voting for someone else? They long ago accepted that Ron Paul won’t be president—Rombach actually used those words with me— and their goals for Tampa were more modest. They wanted to contribute to the visibility of the Paul minority and support the addition of platform planks concerning Paul’s top issues, the Fed and undeclared wars. The affidavit ercise seemed beside the point.