The GOP has a procedure in its
official rules outlining the party’s options in the event that its presidential or vice presidential nominee dies or withdraws from the race after the
national convention.
Rule 9 of the Rules of the Republican Party—which were last approved and amended at the
Republican National Convention in July 2016—says that if a Republican candidate for president or vice president leaves the race due to “death, declination, or otherwise,” the
Republican National Committee (RNC) has the authority to fill a vacancy by a majority vote of its 168 members or by reconvening the national convention.
If the RNC took the latter route—reconvening the national convention—the logistics and details of this are unknown, but the basic idea is that the right to fill the vacancy would be handed over to the
2,472 delegates of the national convention.
The details of what would happen if the RNC chose to fill the vacancy by a majority vote of its membership are spelled out in Rule 9. It would work like this:
- All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have three members who sit on the Republican National Committee: a state chair, a national committeeman, and a national committeewoman.
- Those three individuals would be entitled to cast the same number of votes for the replacement nominee as their state or territory was entitled to at the national convention. So, for example, California’s three members on the RNC would be responsible for casting 172 votes, while Alaska’s three members would have 28 votes.
- What would happen if California’s three members disagreed on how to cast their state’s 172 votes? Rule 9 says that the state’s votes would be “divided up equally,” and that includes fractions. In other words, each RNC member from California would get 57.3 votes.
- For a candidate to be elected to fill a vacancy, he or she would need to receive a majority of the 2,472 votes up for grabs, which is 1,237.
According to
Rule 8(b), the chair of the RNC must call a meeting for the purpose of filling a vacancy on the national ticket, and he or she must give a minimum of five days notice to the committee members (the minimum is ten days for other matters).