Maine governor: Ted Cruz "stabbing us in back' on delegates #JHedzWorlD

CNN’s has reached out to Cruz’s campaign for comment.

According to aides from both the Kasich and the Trump camps at the convention, all three campaigns had mutually agreed to a slate of delegates — called a “unity ticket” — with the help of LePage and state party officials prior to voting at the convention.

For the unity ticket, the campaigns had agreed that the delegates sent to the national convention should be actual supporters of the candidates they were awarded to, based on the results of the March 5 caucuses, and so each candidate’s slots — in Maine, 12 for Cruz, nine for Trump, and two for Kasich — should be filled with people selected by their campaign.

“The Unity Slate I think is strong,” former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu, a Kasich backer, told CNN. “The Kasich campaign certainly supports it.”

In addition to making for a largely painless delegate slate vote, this would prevent the election of “faithless delegates” who would flip their vote after the first ballot, when delegates are bound, during the presidential nominating process — a scenario the Trump campaign fears.

Proponents of the unity ticket distributed their slate on a sheet of paper with the message, “The presidential campaigns have reached an agreement to recognize the will of the voters and the results of the March 5th Republican Caucuses, by producing a UNITY TICKET that includes a fair distribution of supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz, Mr. Donald J. Trump, and Gov. John R. Kasich for Delegates and Alternate Delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.”

LePage also told conservative radio host Howie Carr that the Cruz team was working to remove the governor himself from Maine’s delegation to the national convention, <div class=" zn-body__paragraph="">Ben Carson, a former 2016 candidate, was a speaker at the state convention Friday night and discussed the roiling dispute with reporters.

Saying “of course” LePage should be one of Maine’s delegates, Carson added, “What we have to recognize is that right now, the reason that the populists are so upset is they feel that they can’t trust government, can’t trust political parties — the last thing we need to be doing is engaging in subterfuge and things that aren’t transparent, and utilizing tricks and saying, ‘well this is the rules.’”

“Whether they are the rules or not, we need to be sensitive to the perception of the populists. And we need to be doing things in an open and fair way.”

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Maine governor: Ted Cruz "stabbing us in back' on delegates #JHedzWorlD