You misunderstand the meaning of the word “rules”, you confuse the rules with the procedure used to enforce the rules, and you misrepresent what I said. Not very good.
The RULES are the same as they have been for a long time — for a statewide candidate to be on a ballot, they must get the signatures and addresses of 10,000 registered voters, of which 400 must be from each of the 11 congressional districts.
That is the only rule, and it was the rule in force in 2008, and in 2012. It didn’t change in “november or december”, it hasn’t changed in years. It’s not “harder” now than in 2008, it’s the SAME RULE.
The procedures for verification have “changed”, in that before it was an ad-hoc process, and now they actually wrote up the procedure they would use. This happened in October. As part of that procedure, in order to not waste time, they said that if there were 15,000 counted signatures, and 600 from each district, they would ASSUME that there were enough valid ones to meet the 10,000/400 rule, and so they wouldn’t individually verify the names and addresses.
There has never been a case where more than 33% of the signatures for a candidate were rejected, so this seems like a rational procedural step. Why waste the time of your volunteers — in this case, forcing them to count through the Christmas holiday), when it is a virtual certainty that the signatures will be sufficient. As I said, Ron Paul submitted 14,100 signatures, and his were all checked, and he passed the 10,000/400 threshold with no problem.
The fact is that only two candidates submitted signature petitions that met the requirements of Virginia law. The 15000/600 procedure didn’t keep anybody OFF the ballot. If the argument is that the RPV should have ignored the law, and not checked signatures for validity, I reject that argument — if the law is wrong, change it, don’t ignore it.
The problem in Virginia was the inability of most of the candidates to put together campaign teams that could get signatures. I can’t comprehend what Perry’s problem was — he had a major player as his campaign chief of staff, who should have been able to collect signatures.
Every Senate candidate collected enough signatures. It’s not trivial, but it isn’t that hard. I can’t help it that Mitt Romney had an actual campaign organization (they have been here since 2007, they collected enough signatures that year, and they had the lists of people to contact to do it again. And I don’t have to explain Ron Paul’s organizational skills).
“You misunderstand the meaning of the word “rules”, you confuse the rules with the procedure used to enforce the rules, and you misrepresent what I said. Not very good.”
You were specifically accusing Newt, Perry, and the other candidates of being incompetent since the rules had always been the same and they “knew” about it beforehand. When in reality, the rules were changed one month before the deadline, when before they were in compliance and would have been on the ballot, until that fateful change which, coincidentally, aided the Big Money Candidate and the other one who had a fan base with lots and lots of spare time on their hands with no day jobs. Sorry, doesn’t pass the smell test.