The Problems of a Contested Nominating Convention

There are two plausible scenarios for the Republican presidential race.  One is that Donald Trump will be the nominee.  The other is that Trump will have a plurality but not a majority of the delegates when the GOP goes into its convention in Cleveland. This sort of "brokered convention" would be a dream for many political enthusiasts, but there are some tricky problems that I want to discuss.

The last national convention that went to a second ballot for its presidential candidate was in 1952.  (In 1976, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan went into the convention separated by a small number of delegates, but Ford won the first ballot.)  This means that there is nobody alive with experience at attending or managing a convention with multiple ballots.  This is bound to lead to confusion.

Now you might respond to the first point by saying "Surely there are rules in place to deal with a situation in which no candidate receives a majority on the first ballot."  Yes there are.  But the rules in place are not necessarily the rules that will govern the convention.  The Convention can adopt its own rules. This is why in the days of yore, the election of the Convention Chair was crucial because that person made all of the initial rulings (subject to being overruled by a floor vote).  Likewise, there can be challenges to delegate credentials on the floor.  When you see a news report that says Cruz won 10 delegates in a state, that is only a provisional figure.  Maybe the Convention will decide that he won 8.  This is why control of the credentials committee was also traditionally vital--go back and read how President Taft excluded lots of Teddy Roosevelt's delegates in 1912 to block his nomination.

All of this raises a deeper question. What if an unhappy candidate decides to sue the RNC over something that happened at the convention?  The contested conventions of old occurred in an era when everybody accepted the norm that the Convention's decisions were final.  I think that is still the correct rule, but you can see how a candidate might plausibly seek a judicial remedy if, say, the rules of the Convention were not followed, changed on the fly, or were blatantly unfair.  Where would that sort of litigation leave the fall campaign?