That is false. There was no rule in the last decade under which they would have made the ballot. The rule, based on the law of Virginia, requires, and has required, 10,000 valid signatures of registered voters, with 400 in each congressional district.
Two conservative candidates failed to even collect 10,000 signatures. Two other conservative candidates failed to collect 10,000 valid signatures.
You can keep SAYING that the rules changed, but it is false.
“That is false. There was no rule in the last decade under which they would have made the ballot. The rule, based on the law of Virginia, requires, and has required, 10,000 valid signatures of registered voters, with 400 in each congressional district.”
“...prior to the 2012 elections it was Republican party policy in Virginia to simply deem any candidate that brought in ten thousand raw signatures as having met the primary ballot requirements under Virginian state election law. So, for example, Alan Keyes (a popular negative example for people making the ‘any competent campaign’ argument) apparently did not actually have his petitions checked in 2000 and 2008; absent going back and looking at the paperwork (assuming that it even still exists), there’s no way to tell whether he would have survived the scrutiny of 2012. And that’s true of every other candidate who has appeared on the primary ballot in Virginia. None of them qualify for an apples-to-apples comparison – and this remains true no matter how many signatures were collected. If you know that your signatures will not be checked if you get above 10K, you are simply operating in a fundamentally different environment than one where you know that your signatures will be checked.”
Now either this is BS, and everything I’ve read on the subject is BS, or the rules did radically change one month prior to the deadline.