You are obviously not keeping up with this developing story and the facts involved.
The number to hit to avoid review was 10,000....Gingrich and Perry both had over 11,000.
Romney turned in his 16,000 and the next day, the VaGOP changed the rules to 15,000 to avoid review. This happened very recently.
“The number to hit to avoid review was 10,000....Gingrich and Perry both had over 11,000.”
10K is not the number to avoid review. The Code of Virginia requires 10K signatures of registered voters, with 400 of those from each Congressional District. Perry cut it close with 11,910 and Gingrich with 11,050. That really doesn’t provide the margin required to offset anticipated disqualified non-verifiable signatures. I.e., you could sign a petition as R.B. Miller, Jr. if that were the name under which you were registered to vote in VA. How helpful is that? You’d need also to provide an address where R.B.M., Jr. is registered to vote in VA. How else are they supposed to verify that R.B.M., Jr is, in fact, a registered voter in VA or any of its 11 Congressional Districts?
The State Committee Chairmen have the statutory responsibility to certify that their party’s candidates meet those statutory requirement. RPV determined that 15K signatures with 600 from each Congressional District (half again the required numbers) would provide the necessary buffer to eliminate the need to go thru all the signatures. The campaigns knew that. Perry’s and Gingrich’s campaigns tried to achieve it but came up short. But now we’re supposed to believe, with no evidence whatsoever, that it was all some vast conspiracy to aid and abet Romney.
The idea that the party verification process was changed unilaterally, arbitrarily, and capriciously the day before the petition review remains to be seen. That is nothing more than an internet rumor, taken as Gospel. If the ‘rule’ was changed the day before the count, how is it that Gingrich and Perry knew when undertaking their signature collecting that they wanted 15K?
If we’re looking at ‘facts,’ one that I haven’t seen discussed here is the fact that the entire state of VA and 5 other southern states have been under the jurisdiction of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice since 1964 for ALL their voting laws. Various jurisdictions within the state(s) have been released from that oversight in recent years, the most recent being in October, 2011. Any change to the state’s voting statutes remains subject to DOJ/CRD approval. And, one might assume, given that lengthy federal oversight, VA’s voting laws are quite Constitutional. Personally, I’d prefer to wait until Holder is out as AG before making any changes to VA’s voting laws. After all, neither Gingrich nor Perry are ‘his people.’