Three Colorado Republicans are asking the Republican National Committee to unseat national convention delegates elected in April, alleging that the state party botched the election process to such an extent that the results should be thrown out.

Another Republican is preparing a challenge – the deadline to file is Saturday – charging that the ballot for Republican National Convention delegates didn’t include her corresponding number, so it was impossible for anyone to vote for her, among other complaints.

“The conduct of the April 9 State Convention did not permit the will of the body to be determined with a reasonable degree of certainty,” charges a lengthy “Notice of Contest” document filed Monday with the RNC’s Standing Committee on Contests, adding, “The combination of significant violations of election rules and the chaotic environment of the convention resulted in an inaccurate, unfair, and reckless election and certification of at-large delegates that must not stand.”

State Republicans convened in Colorado Springs on April 9 to elect 13 delegates and an equal number of alternates to the RNC, which takes place July 18-21 in Cleveland. Republicans also picked 21 delegates and 21 alternates at earlier congressional district assemblies and are sending as automatic delegates state GOP chairman Steve House, Republican National Committeeman George Leing and Republican National Committeewoman Lily Nuñez.

State Republican officials said they had just received the notice of contest on late Monday afternoon and would have no comment until they’d had a chance to review it.

The contest notice asserts that the election was conducted in a “reckless, non-compliant manner,” including multiple violations of both state and national party rules and bylaws, including noncompliant ballots, inaccurate tabulation, erroneous and incomplete lists of delegate candidates and massive voter confusion.

For starters, the document alleges, party rules require that RNC delegate candidates’ names and presidential preferences appear on the ballot, but instead the ballot was just a long optical-scan card with hundreds of numbers. Adding to the confusion, some of the numbers appeared out of sequence and some were missing entirely, while the companion list of candidate names kept changing and many were listed with inaccurate corresponding numbers.

“I’m just speechless at all the things the state party allowed to happen with this convention,” Kathryn Porter, one of the three Republicans who filed the contest Monday, told The Colorado Statesman.

Former state GOP Secretary Lana Fore and Republican activist Susan Sharp Carr have also signed onto the contest.

Filing a contest to a state’s RNC delegation starts a complicated process that operates somewhat like a court appeal. The committee – made up of nine RNC members elected by region with a chairman appointed by the RNC chairman – meets several times to consider challenges to state delegations and makes a recommendation to another committee before the national convention convenes.

Porter and Fore, both El Paso County residents, were delegates to the state convention and ran for the RNC slots. Sharp was a delegate to the Pueblo County convention but not the state convention.

Porter has crossed swords with House – he told two RNC delegates they couldn’t bring her as a guest to the convention, saying her work as a blogger meant she instead had to apply for media credentials – but maintains there’s nothing personal, she is simply trying to make sure the state GOP fixes its election procedures.

“I’m doing this to hold the party accountable,” Porter said. “I feel like our state party leadership is talking about winning elections, but I think we first must win the hearts and minds of Republicans who have lost faith in the party.”

The contest notice includes a lengthy list of what it terms “widespread, pervasive violations of the Rules that resulted in the improper selection and certification of all Colorado at-large delegates and alternates.”

Allegations include everything from using a forbidden ballot format to failing to provide microphones on the floor at the World Arena so delegates could raise objections or ask questions during the balloting.

The three contestants also argue that the state GOP acted unfairly by projecting the names and ballot numbers of a slate of candidates backed by the campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on a screen for more than 20 minutes as Cruz addressed the convention.

As it turns out, the 16 members of the Cruz slate took the top 16 positions – all 13 delegates and the top three alternates – by a wide margin. (Cruz was locked in a close struggle with billionaire Donald Trump for delegate support at the time the convention took place but suspended his campaign several weeks later.)

“Election irregularities were prevalent and of such magnitude that the results selecting the 26 Respondents are materially inaccurate, unverifiable, and unreliable,” the notice reads.

The contestants are asking the RNC to appoint Porter and Fore as delegates, taking the place of two delegates “chosen to be decertified at the discretion of (the) committee.” In addition, they’re asking that three more delegates be removed and replaced with others “as representatives of the 610 candidates who were treated less favorably.”

“What we hope to achieve is,” Porter said, “is we would like to see five seats for grassroots delegates as representative of the hundreds, maybe thousands who were treated unfairly. They were treated unfairly because of the negligence at a level I can’t even imagine, the way this convention was run.”

Denver Republican Molly Sullivan was also a national delegate candidate and is preparing a separate challenge based on a different list of rules violations.

She says House basically dared her to file the contest when she raised questions recently about delegate election procedures and asked to see some records.

“We will take no further action on this matter until your contest has been filed and the committee has decided how we should proceed,” House told Sullivan in a June 3 email obtained by The Statesman. He sent her the procedures for filing a contest in a separate email.

“It’s a toxic reaction to an interest in establishing wrongdoing or accountability and what can be done in the future,” Sullivan said. “It’s taking the hardest line possible. It’s the nuclear option. I feel pushed into the corner because the state party is effectively saying, you’re not going to get this information unless you take on an incredibly difficult challenge at a high level that’s going to be very expensive and very draining and in the national spotlight.”

Sullivan was assigned ballot number 513, according to the ballot supplement – a pamphlet listing delegate candidates with corresponding punch-card numbers and presidential preferences – but the optical-scan ballot didn’t have a 513, instead listing 512, 523 and 514 in sequence. (The same 523 was assigned to another candidate and appeared further down the ballot in its normal sequence.) While she argues no one could vote for her based on the faulty ballot design, she says that wasn’t the only problem.

“The ballot was just egregious – it had hundreds of extra numbers than there were people running, and it didn’t follow the party rules by having their names on it. On top of that, the booklet was wrong,” she said.

Sullivan, who just finished law school at the University of Denver and is studying for the bar exam, said that filing a contest over RNC delegates was the last thing she wanted to do this summer.

“I was going to take a year off of politics, and this is what the universe threw at me. Extraordinary times sometimes call for doing the right thing,” she said. “It’s not that I lost – that’s not the issue. The level of disregard for the rules and the level of rebuke and ‘screw you’ for trying to acknowledge it or fix it, that’s what’s wrong.”

– ernest@coloradostateman.com

CORRECTION: The ballot used to select at-large delegates to the Republican National Convention at the Colorado state convention was an optical-scan ballot, not a punch-card ballot, as this story originally said.