Monday, July 13th, 2020
Dear Convention Delegates & Alternates,
The State Republican Executive Committee voted tonight to move our State Convention online.
We thank our incredible team of attorneys for their valiant work, fighting for our right to hold our Convention in person in Houston until all legal remedies were exhausted.
We have had a wonderful start to our State Convention week in Houston with the Temporary Rules, Platform, and Legislative Priorities Committees meeting in person. We look forward to continuing our important work this week in an online convention, including adopting our Platform, electing our Party leaders, electing our National Delegates and Alternates and the pinnacle moment of electing the Presidential Electors who will proudly cast Texas’ 38 electoral votes for President Donald J. Trump.
Let’s dive into a few key topics.
HOTELS
If you booked a hotel room through one of the RPT room blocks, your reservation will be automatically canceled Tuesday morning and any deposits will be refunded. Please allow time for the hotels to process the refunds. If you booked a room outside of the RPT blocks, you will need to contact the hotel to cancel directly. In addition, if you are serving on a temporary committee and have already checked in or are due to check in today, your reservation will still be active. Since all rooms will be canceled automatically, if you are still traveling to Houston and in need of a hotel room please contact Katie Hrkman at , and she will work with you to get the reduced rate.
TRAINING
Knowing that tomorrow is a runoff Election Day for many jurisdictions across Texas, we will hold our first training session when the polls close at 7:00 PM CT Tuesday night. Chairman Dickey will personally lead four live trainings that will walk a delegate through a Senate District Caucus utilizing the Zoom platform and the Meeting Pulse electronic voting system. This online Convention experience training will include how to download Zoom, how to log in to Zoom, how to use the chat and chat functions in Zoom, the purpose of the waiting rooms in Zoom, the mute/unmute system in Zoom, how to access Meeting Pulse, how to use Meeting Pulse, parliamentary procedure overview, and more.
Below is the live training schedule:
- Tuesday, July 14 at 7:00 PM
- Wednesday, July 15 at 10:00 AM
- Wednesday, July 15 at 5:00 PM
- Wednesday, July 15 at 9:30 PM
To support the live training, we will have a video of the live training available for delegates, tutorial videos on each step mentioned, and downloadable reference documents with images related to the instructions.
Watch for an email tomorrow ahead of the first training session with more details.
EMAIL COLLECTION
There are two ways RPT will have your email as a Convention delegate or alternate. The first, RPT has 100% of the emails for those who registered for the Convention. The second, when delegates and alternates are elected at their local conventions, we have those emails provided in the documents sent to us from the local County and Senate District Conventions.
If someone has not been receiving information from RPT that could mean that their County or Senate District did not report their email or there may have been a typo at some point. It was required that every person who registered provide an email address, and everyone who is registered has an email associated with their account. If they registered and they haven’t been receiving emails that could mean there was a typo, they have unsubscribed from our emails, or our emails are being sent to spam.
If anyone has any concern about whether they are receiving emails from the RPT about Convention they should email or, if they have registered, they should please log back into their account and ensure the proper email address is there. RPT, SREC Members or County Chairs are authorized parties to collect your email address.
CREDENTIALING
Every elected delegate and alternate will be assigned a unique credential to use to log in to Meeting Pulse and vote during caucuses and general sessions.
If a delegate or alternate is concerned about that credential being provided over email or if they do not have an email account, they can contact the Republican Party of Texas at (512) 477-9821 to discuss secure receipt.
We will have more detailed information regarding the credential process in upcoming emails.
SCHEDULE
As we have reported, our Convention schedule will stay intact in an online convention format. This means that our caucuses and general sessions will begin as scheduled on Zoom. We are working diligently to keep our events as intact as possible in an online setting. We will have more information about those events and the possible refunds in the next two days.
We will have another update for you tomorrow.
Thank you again for your willingness to serve as a State Convention Delegate or Alternate!
Sincerely,
Chairman James Dickey
Republican Party of Texas
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