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.
“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.”
Except that the rules were changed sometime in November or December to up the amount required from 10,000 to 15,000, and also fixed it to where if you get above 15,000 your signatures will not be checked. There are also many other ridiculous nuances to consider in the entire way the state GOP of Virginia handles it.
There’s no real reason why major candidates shouldn’t be getting on a ballot. The only conclusion is that either the GOP of Virginia is incompetent, which is probably the case, or they’re corrupt. I’m happy with either option, especially when they tried pulling the loyalty oath nonsense as well.