Thanks for the link to his filing!
This is an interesting approach.
First, note that he sues the Virginia Board of Elections. This is important, because they are the ones that put together the forms and requirements to implement the law. The RPV only acts under the direction of the VBE.
Second, the challenge isn’t to the idea of collecting signatures, or the rule that the people signing be registered voters. Instead, he is challenging the requirement that the signatures be COLLECTED by eligible voters.
As he points out, this would violate his “freedom of association” rights, because it means a candidate cannot choose the people he WANTS to collect his signatures.
More interestingly, and I hadn’t thought of this one — a candidate cannot actually collect his OWN SIGNATURES in virginia, because the candidates cannot vote in Virginia. So if Perry wanted to personally insure he had signatures, and was willing to go door-to-door, he couldn’t actually get signatures under the law as written.
I suppose there is an underlying argument here, which is that there is no compelling reason to require the people gathering the signatures to be able to vote. They are simply collecting signatures — it’s the people who SIGN that are important.
Virginia will probably argue that they need to use eligible voters because then they have some control over them; but those collecting signatures have to sign and notarize each page, swearing an oath. So there’s legal control over the signature collection, without requiring the signature gatherers to be eligible to vote.
I think I remember there was some sort of court case which ended up with federal courts ruling that minors could donate to candidates, even though candidates are only supposed to get money from people “eligible to vote”. I don’t know any of the specifics though, and I could be mis-remembering that whole thing.
Lastly, I guess you could also argue that the rule unfairly benefits candidates who are from Virginia, since they could collect their own signatures. Of course, that didn’t help Gingrich, and in reality what Perry wanted to be able to do was bring in his own team that he trusted to collect signatures.
I’m not happy with the suit. Perry had Kilgore running his campaign, and Kilgore should have had access to eligible volunteers to collect signatures. But I would be happy if we could get more people on our ballot, so whatever it takes. I appreciate that Perry didn’t launch any wild accusations, or compare his lack of ballot access to Pearl Harbor.
And I assume that if Perry wins, Gingrich wins as well. Of course, they could have sued together. But if they had that kind of coordination, they could have helped each other get signatures and wouldn’t be in this position.
