Virginia 2011 Candidate for Legislature has Impact on Pres. Primary (Newt & Perry have a case?)

There are currently many news stories and blog discussions about the Virginia presidential primary ballot access law. Some large blogs, such as Red State, have over 300 comments about the story. Some defend the current Virginia ballot access laws on the grounds that in past presidential elections, a fairly large number of Republican presidential primary candidates managed to qualify.

But what has not been reported is that in the only other presidential primaries in which Virginia required 10,000 signatures (2000, 2004, and 2008) the signatures were not checked. Any candidate who submitted at least 10,000 raw signatures was put on the ballot. In 2000, five Republicans qualified: George Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, and Steve Forbes. In 2004 there was no Republican primary in Virginia. In 2008, seven Republicans qualified: John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Alan Keyes.

The only reason the Virginia Republican Party checked the signatures for validity for the current primary is that in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court. It was filed too late to be heard before the election, but is still pending. The effect of the lawsuit was to persuade the Republican Party to start checking petitions. If the Republican Party had not changed that policy, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would be on the 2012 ballot.

The Democratic Party of Virginia has been opposed to the strict law on primary ballot access, and has been in the habit of collecting signatures for all Democratic presidential candidates recognized by the party. In 2008, the state party collected 7,300 signatures for all its candidates, thus easing the burden on them and requiring them to collect only 4,000 to 5,000 on their own.

Oh yes, I recall clearly when the guy I so wanted to support, Rick Perry, couldn’t even bother to get enough signatures on a petition to make it onto our ballot.

4 months later my local house delegate candidate managed to get 7000 more statewide signatures to run for Senate than Perry or Gingrich had managed to get.

I’m guessing Gingrich was simply never a serious candidate, it didn’t try to get signatures until the last minute, even though he LIVED in the state (supposedly).

But Perry? He had the implicit backing of our governor. He had a guy running his state campaign that knew the rules. And he had people IN the state who were supporting him, like me, who had registered on his web site.

He showed up in September to speak at a state RPV meeting — and didn’t collect a SINGLE signature.

Then we had a november election — and he didn’t have a single person out collecting signatures.

And even though I wrote his campaign 3 times offering to collect signatures, he never got back to me.

I assumed he had people going door-to-door, and would have no trouble getting signatures. After all, that is what Romney was doing, and how he managed to get thousands more signatures than needed.

But it turned out Perry had no idea what he was doing. It was sad. And Newt Gingrich did his typical last-minute “buy the signatures” and managed to hire a guy who cheated. And Rick Santorum didn’t even bother.

It was a sad day indeed. I remember writing to my acquaintance Ken Cuccinelli, who I have supported for years, and asking him to intervene since his forces were poised to take over the RPV (part of eliminating the primary for the governor race). But he felt that rules were rules, and we should abide by them no matter how badly they worked out for us. He was certainly no Romney supporter.

And given the passage of time, the use of the rules has not become any less valid than it was when the rules were first applied. The Senate candidates all managed to get their signatures, as did most everybody in every other race we’ve had.

Oh, and my opinion hasn’t changed that we should modify the ballot access rules, at least for presidential contests where we don’t truly control which candidates are on the ballot (which is a national contest), and therefore we are simply preventing virginians from voting on the real candidates.

Meanwhile, I have lost a lot of political respect for both Bill Bolling (who on the other hand at the end did the “right” thing to stop talk of an independent candidacy, and probably did us a favor by not bringing his losing fight to the convention), and for Bob McDonnell, who I have written to (and also his staff, since I am on multiple mailing lists) several times protesting the disastrous transportation bill.

But that doesn’t change my opinion that the RPV did NOT make a rules change to help Romney. There is a rational explanation for what they did — a pending lawsuit about signature checks. I knew about the rules and the checks months before the signatures were due, and wrote to all three candidates I cared about to remind them of their requirements (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry).

If I knew, they should have known. The story that Gingrich was blindsided by this infuriates me, because I’m a nobody, not even in an Republican committee anymore, and I KNEW. How can a guy actually running for President not bother to know what the rules are. How can they not have one staffer whose job it is each day to check with the state committee and find out what is happening.

And how did they manage to run a campaign to get on our ballot without enlisting people to collect signatures at our November election, or to come to the committees and ask them to get signatures?

I could easily have collected 25 signatures for all three candidates. And I’m sure there are at least 200 other people in the state who would have done so — problem solved.

I didn’t because none ever asked me. Except 2 days before the deadline, Gingrich sent me a blast e-mail telling me I could drive to FAIRFAX in rush-hour traffic to sign a petition in a building. Petitions are little pieces of paper — would it have been hard for him to send ONE VOLUNTEER out to the Manassas Mall, and told people in Prince William to sign THERE?

BTW, it also really didn’t matter now. Perry was out of the race really before Virginia voted, and even if Gingrich had managed to win Virginia it wouldn’t have stopped Romney. Maybe Santorum could have won Virginia, and that might have given him the additional momentum to overcome the tar-like drag the dying Gingrich campaign was while it tried to tear Santorum down in the end.

People keep saying this was Bolling. But Bolling had no power to drive the RPV to make such a ruling. He was in the midst of losing all control over the RPV, leading to the decision to have a convention rather than a primary, which killed whatever slim chance he had to win the republican endorsement for governor.

I don’t know who Virginia’s RNC representatives are, or if the RNC took any position on this issue.

I will note also that, at this point, it doesn’t appear anybody has done anything to change the ballot rules, despite widespread belief that they were wrong-headed.

They have been applied once since the Presidential primary, and that was for the Senate primary which Allen won. All candidates easily met the threshold of 15,000 votes, so there was no need to count.

And I agree, I haven’t read anything about the lawsuit since it was an issue back in 2011.

I would love to go to closed primaries, and to also get rid of conventions for statewide offices. This year’s race is a perfect example of why. We have all these people running for Lt. Governor. If there was a primary, we wouldn’t have so many to start with. And I can’t go to the convention, because I will be out of town that day. A Primary I could vote Absentee.

Not that it really matters. I could have gone to my local convention, where we picked delegates to the state convention. But we have fewer delegates than slots, so each delegate will get more than one vote. If I had gone and gotten elected (as everybody did because we didn’t have enough), it would simply have lowered everybody else’s vote value slightly. I figured I could have swayed the PWC total vote about .1 vote toward whatever candidate I wanted.

That’s because each group gets a fixed number of votes no matter how many people show up. And since my county has a pretty active group, we tend to send a lot more people. Frankly, i wish we could take a straw poll at our local convention, and then elect 100 total people who would pledge to vote based on the straw poll. That would give each candidate the “correct’ vote to within 1% of our desires, and we wouldn’t all waste our time.

Anyway, with a closed primary, we could actually trust the primaries. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any real evidence that the democrats have unduly influenced our state primaries in the past. We simply really do have a “moderate republican” problem.

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Virginia 2011 Independent Candidate for Legislature has Big Impact on 2012 Presidential Primary