Posted on 12/28/2011 1:45:07 PM PST by BarnacleCenturion
Algona, Iowa (CNN) - Newt Gingrich cited fraud Wednesday as the reason he didn't get on the Virginia primary ballot.
Last week his campaign acknowledged they used paid volunteers to scramble to get the required 10,000 signatures but fell short after the former House speaker and Virginia resident boasted his campaign was submitting as many as 12,000-14,000 signatures.
On a campaign stop at an Algona chocolate store, the former House speaker said the "mistake" occurred because one of their workers committed fraud.
(Excerpt) Read more at politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com ...
Silly, Gingrich! Voter fraud doesn’t happen. NPR says so!
I knew Al Gore was behind this.
Next time, Gingrich should try venturing outside the Beltway for a change to collect his signatures.
A double agent. Who did he really work for?
Seems to me that if Perry wins his court battle, it will also be a win for Newt and all.
However, 'volunteers' as a whole tend to do a better job and are earnest about it. It helps to have a base of support out there campaigning for a candidate, no matter who that puppet is.
More likely a lazy college student that wanted money without working.
Another point is that he was trying to qualify at the very last minute. I understand that his surge came late in the campaign, but back in June when he launched his campaign, his numbers weren't that bad. If he'd concentrated on ballot access during those first two weeks instead of taking a cruise in the Mediterranean, maybe he would have qualified.
Crock of pure crap. I have never heard a more stupid remark.
Virginia actually required the signature collection to take place within a specified time window. I’m not sure if they were even allowed to begin as early as June.
Granted the last-minute nature of Newt’s signature collection was the problem. Other campaigns probably have the same fraud problem, but have time to correct it. Newt only shot to frontrunner status a month or so ago, and probably had no money up until then. It still seems that his fundraising was lagging behind, and the latest dips in the polls can’t have helped. He probably only had the money this month to get on ballots, and he’s trying to play catch up in 50 states all at once. He was juggling a lot of balls and dropped one. It’s not indicative of anything other than him becoming a late frontrunner.
As I recall, Romney has also been turning in his signatures at the last minute in Ohio and VA. So it’s not like even the well-funded campaigns tried to do this really early on. They have to prioritize and there is probably always something more important to do somewhere else until the deadline hits.
It doesn’t help that Virginia was determined that Gingrich or any other conservative not get on the ballot, specifically, that Romney get the nomination at any expense.
Boasting we don’t need.
You’ve got to give him props for coming clean rather than obscure the facts with finger pointing outside his own circle.
Wanna bet that whoever Newt hired did this on purpose on behalf of Mittens? Remember that the VA Lt. Gov is head of the Mittens for Prez campaign in the state.
This is only half the story. The guy didn’t create those fraudulent signatures all in one day. Somebody was supposed to be supervising him and the guy should have been turning in his sheets as he finished them.
So, somebody else in the campaign was guilty, and it could have been a planned thing with the two of them pulling it off.
There’s another shoe that needs to drop.
Duhhh, Gingrich lives in Virginia.
That sucks. It’s hard enough to get signatures, without your paid help cutting corners.
A friend of my daughters was working to get signatures for Obama. They paid good money, but you needed to get something like 75 signatures an hour or else you didn’t get any money.
That seemed rife for fraud.
July 1st.
Gingrich lives inside the Beltway.
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