Punditry agrees that if former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum bombs in the Ohio primary his up again down again candidacy could be doomed. Now it appears he may face a voting snafu that could hamper his vote total:
Rick Santorum was already known as starting from a deficit, delegate-wise, in Ohio. He failed to qualify for any district delegates in three Ohio congressional districts because he didn’t turn in delegate names there.
But his delegate troubles go deeper. According to the Ohio Republican Party tonight, the former Pennsylvania U.S. senator filed incomplete delegate slates in six additional Ohio districts.
Altogether, this means Santorum, who until this week had a fair lead in polls in the Republican nominating race, could be ineligible for 18 Ohio district delegates.
Ohio has 66 delegates total, 63 at stake next Tuesday. The candidate with the most delegates wins. Santorum therefore goes into the Ohio primary election with a 29 percent deficit.
What will happen if he wins in a district where he failed to allocate a full slate of three delegates?
In the short term, he will be eligible to take only the delegates he has already allocated in that district, the party says. Yet he will have won that district — so the unallocated delegates will not be awarded to anyone else, either.
After all, they did not win them.
Of course, he could win by a huge margin and it wouldn’t matter. But polls show the Ohio race tightening as Romney picks up steam.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.