“Virginia was not corrupt or rigged, and I resent the slander against my own state’s representatives. A lot of people were upset that their candidates couldn’t do the simple task of collecting signatures, and decided it was part of some nefarious plot.”
Of course it’s corrupt and rigged. In Texas you just need 300 signatures to get on a ballot and maybe a fee. The fact that Virginia rules basically disenfranchised a huge amount of voters by keeping almost every major candidate, except for the two most despised, off the ballot is proof enough of that. It’s a system that obviously supports the big money candidate who can buy the organization he needs to do it. So where exactly can the Herman Cains of the world, or the Joe the Plumbers, ever hope to run for President when the system is dominated by our version of the Roman aristocracy?
And as for the caucus system in general. This IS a Republic, after all. I don’t like Paul’s foreign policy either, but if he can throw a wrench in the system and get us into a brokered convention, that could be a godsend to save us from the clutches of the GOPe and Mittens. Even if it fails, I’d rather Mitt be severely damaged than to have to deal with him for 4 years, and have to campaign for him again after that since we wouldn’t even have the option to nominate a conservative. Better to let Obama have the Presidency and focus all our effort in taking the Senate. Besides, as a common enemy, he’ll do a lot more to unify conservatives than Mitt “pathological liar” Romney.
As I said, all the Senate candidates were able to easily get the signatures they needed. And we’ve had the large signature rules for years, and this was the first year there were so many incompetent campaigns.
Of course, it appears that the campaigns mostly refused to get help from the committees, or to help each other out — I think each one was hoping they could collect the signatures, while their opponents would fail.
Romney had no trouble, because he actually had an organization in the state, and paid attention. Ron Paul had no trouble collecting signatures. In 2008, multiple candidates did it.
Your only “evidence” for something being wrong is that we happen to have 4 incompetent campaign organizations this year. These 4 campaigns actually missed the opportunity to collect signatures AT A GENERAL STATEWIDE ELECTION, which is the easiest thing to do. In contrast, the senate candidates just did their collections during the presidential primary, which had extremely low turnout. And yet one candidate collected 21,000 signatures, another over 17,000 signatures, and the other two were able to collect more than enough valid signatures.
BTW, Herman Cain was collecting signatures in the november election, and I bet he had enough signatures to make the ballot. All the other candidates needed to do was to place their petitions on the table next to the Cain ones — the collection at my precinct was being done by the committee volunteer, not a dedicated Cain guy — it was just Cain was the only candidate to ask.
In the aforementioned Senate campaign, Bob Marshall runs entire delegate campaigns with a VOLUNTEER staff — He is a state delegate, but in his second federal senate run, was able to collect over 17,000 signatures. His campaign contacted volunteers on the phone, and was able to collect signatures across the state. Money is one way to get signatures, but you can also simply appeal to the voters.
Perry could have easily gotten 15,000 signatures. He had 11,000 including invalid ones — it would have been easy to get vounteers to collect 4000 more.