Posted on 12/29/2011 4:33:17 AM PST by markomalley
The fight to place all seven Republican presidential candidates on Virginia's primary ballot is moving toward the courts while one candidate bumped from the ballot, Newt Gingrich, insisted Wednesday that he was the victim of fraud.
The conservative Citizens for the Republic and former Democratic Party of Virginia Chairman Paul Goldman said Wednesday that Virginia failed to follow its own laws in determining which candidates should make the ballot. The state delegated its duties to the political parties without double-checking their work, Goldman said.
Virginia requires candidates to submit signatures from 10,000 registered voters, including 400 from each of the state's 11 congressional districts. The rules came under scrutiny after two presidential contenders trying to get on the March 6 ballot -- Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry -- were rejected because they didn't have enough valid signatures. Only former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas made the Virginia ballot.
Perry failed to hand in the minimum 10,000 signatures, officials said, while Gingrich, a former House speaker who calls Virginia home, barely met the threshold and fell below it when some of his signers were disqualified.
Gingrich said his campaign paid an outside group to gather petitions and someone from that group submitted 1,500 fraudulent signatures, disqualifying him.
The State Board of Elections warned candidates in March to collect 15,000 to 20,000 signatures to ensure they'd meet the 10,000-name threshold.
In a statement defending its actions, Virginia Republicans said they also informed candidates in October to get 15,000 signatures and noted that none of the campaigns "offered any complaints until after the Dec. 23 validation process had concluded." Gingrich and Perry "did not come close to the 10,000 valid signature threshold" and were properly disqualified, the party said.
Those challenging the ballot process say it's unlawful because each political party uses a different standard for certifying petitions, and neither party verifies whether a person actually signed the petition. Instead, parties cross-check names and addresses against a database of registered voters.
Goldman and Citizens for the Republic are asking state leaders to convene a special General Assembly session immediately to change the rules so that any credible candidate can appear on the primary ballot. There's a sense of urgency because absentee ballots must be printed and mailed by Jan. 21.
"There's no perfect solution, but there are better solutions than what you have," Goldman said. "It basically makes us the laughingstock of the country."
Lawmakers, however, see little reason to change a system that worked for more than a decade.
"Every statewide candidate has to do that," said Republican House Speaker Bill Howell. "These aren't outlandish restrictions. We've been living with them for years. Perhaps we need to look at the law, but we'll do so prospectively, not retroactively."
Perry filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday insisting that Virginia's ballot restrictions are unconstitutional. And Goldman and Citizens for the Republic are willing to do the same.
"The argument is we've been doing it the wrong way for years and years and we see no reason to change it," said Bill Pascoe, executive vice president for the conservative group. "I don't anticipate having to go to court. But is that an option? Sure."
If they’re going to start giving out prizes for ‘trying’, why not put all the declared candidates on the ballot?
No limits? 1000 candidates, 10,000 candidates? Can I fill out form and put myself on the ballot just for grins?
Utter self-defeating confusion.
Good points! Yes, demonic-rats can vote and they love the traitorous coward, Ron Paul.
VA is making itself irrelevant.
Why not indeed? FWIW, allow and accept write-in votes.
COnfusion is normal for newspapers. My guess is they misunderstood the court filing. Perry’s lawyers put the number of verified (qualified) signatures in the filing, not the total they submitted, and some have mistakenly thought Perry’s team was saying they only submitted that many.
There’s been a lot of confusion. For example, Ron Paul didn’t submit 15,000 signatures, as some have said. He went through the full verification process, but had enough valid signatures. The process was to check each signature until you either found 10,000 good ones, or enough bad ones that there were no longer a possibility of 10,000 good ones.
Therefore, nobody knows how many total valid signatures anybody had; they stopped counting Paul at 10,000, and stopped counting Perry and Gingrich when they hit enough bad ones. So when you see “weren’t close”, that’s somewhat becuase if they had found 6000 good signatures at the time they found the 2000th’s bad signature, they’d stop, and you wouldn’t know whether the last 4000 signatures were good or bad.
Santorum did try to get signatures, but he didn’t make it to 10,000 total, so he didn’t submit them. I wish he had, beause then he’d fall under whatever relief the others may get by the courts.
Not to mention it would seem to affect Virginia economically by restricting itself in the election this way. Just seems stupid all the way around.
That was incorrect speculation that has been repeated.
I have confirmed with the former Chair of the RPV that in 2009, they meticulously checked every signature and address for the statewide races — the Lt. Governor race was of particular interest, as the front-runner was hoping not to have a challenger. I can’t confirm what happened in 2008, but by 2009, the practice was to fully check the signatures.
The 15,000-signature “exception” was published in October, not November. It was done after the primary schedule was finalized, when the RPV realised that the counting all had to be done in the 5 days over Christmas.
They did a historical search, and found that no candidate had ever had more than 33% of their signatures rejected, and coupled with the VBE recommendation that candidates get at least 15,000 signatures to be safe (VBE put that out in May to all the campaigns), the RPV decided that if you submitted 15,000, they would just count your signatures with filled-out addresses, and if you had 15,000 and 600 for each district, they wouldn’t go back and check that the signatures were all registered voters.
This was a time-saving measure, but isn’t irrational, although I would have recommended they check 1000 signatures first and see what the failure rate is, and then decide whether they needed to keep counting.
Ron Paul’s signatures were checked, and he had 10,000 verified good signatures. Only Romney’s weren’t checked, but he had so many signatures that it is virtually certain that he has 10,000 good ones. Remember that Romney had an existing database of registered voters, and has kept that up to date as he’s been running for 5 years. He collected signatures in 2008, so he had names and addresses to go hit again.
It’s funny though that while here we have a couple of people decrying that democrats can vote in our primary, in another thread people are attacking the RPV for attempting to stop democrats from voting in our primary.
It sounds to me that Newt and Perry were trying to be honest. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I understand it is if they had at least 15,000 signatures, they wouldn’t have been checked and they’d be on the ballot. So does that mean that Newt and Perry could have added enough sigs to get to 15,000 and no questions would have been asked? They’re being penalized because they didn’t just cheat? I wouldn’t be surprised if Romney and Paul both had fake signatures.
So far as I can tell, nobody is happy with this. Mullins wanted all the candidates on the ballot; I think he actually would prefer Perry, but he is officially neutral as Party chair.
I know many members of the RPV support Perry or Gingrich, and are not happy with the outcome. There were Perry and Gingrich supporters among the signature checkers as well, who were unhappy when they found bad signatures.
But sometimes you are stuck with outcomes you are unhappy with. We have a law, for good or for bad, that requires 10,000 signatures from registered voters. The RPV had some discretion in how they did the job they are assigned, but not carte blanche to ignore the requirements.
Contrary to opinion, this is not the first time they have ever checked signatures for validity. In the last election (2009 statewide primary) every signature/address was checked to prove they were from registered voters. This is not a new process. The 15,000-vote “waiver of checking” might have been new, because of the need to get the count done so people could go home for Christmas. But that was voted on by the RPV board, and has a good rational basis. As the RPV noted in their most recent memo, they have never seen a candidate with 15,000 signatures have 33% of those signatures rejected. And Ron Paul, who had fewer than 15,000 signatures, had all his checked and he had over 10,000 valid signatures, which supports the contention that if you get close to 15,000, you likely have 10,000 good ones.
Gingrich has admitted that 1500 of his signatures were forged by one collector — so it is clear Gingrich did not submit 10,000 valid signatures. BTW, if the forgeries were obvious, they would have been rejected even in the “cursory glance” which was done to “check” the 15,000+ signatures for Romney.
Lastly, is there anybody here who thinks that it would have been RIGHT, if there was a 10,000-vote rule, to allow Romney on the ballot if HE had submitted 11,000 signatures, and then admitted that 1500 of those signatures were forged?
There is no defense of a ballot that gives Republicans a choice of Mitt Romney or Ron Paul. Neither of these two bozos are anything close to a Republican.
One of the things that bothers me most is disenfranchisement.
Blacks are screaming about disenfranchisement if they are required to show an ID to vote.
But is it disenfranchisement if you cannot vote for whomever you like?
Now according to what I have read, a Virginia voter cannot write in a name.
With no write in and only two people voting all of those people who want Gingrich, Bachman or Santorum are forced to eiothr vote for those two or stay home.
If that isn’t disenfranchisement, then what is?
Paul didn’t submit 15,000 signatures. All of his signatures were checked, and he had more than 10,000 VALIDATED signatures. It is only Romney that didn’t have his validated.
There is no indication that Romney padded his signatures. It is pretty clear Ron Paul didn’t pad his, since they were all checked and he had 10,000 valid ones.
IN fact, the only indication we have of any CLEAR fraud is with Gingrich, who has publicly stated that 1000-1500 of his signatures were forged. We know that signatures were rejected for Perry, enough to knock him below 10,000, but that doesn’t mean they were faked — they might simply have been non-registered voters who didn’t know better, or people who weren’t registered in the district associated with the form.
BTW, the form signature rules are really tricky. You need to have a separate petition for EACH county and city, and for each district within each county and city (there are 100+ county/city boundaries, and 11 districts total, and some counties/cities have more than one district).
So you could be sitting in a mall in Prince William County collecting signatures. You’d have say 10 petition forms, for combinations of the 10th, 11th, and 1st districts, and for Prince William, Manassas City, Manassas Park City, and maybe Loudoun and Fauquier counties.
So when someone comes to sign your petition, you have to figure out where they live, and what district they vote in, and they have to sign the right petition. If someone signs the WRONG petition, that signature by law must be rejected, even though they could be valid registered voters, and have signed in their correct district, simply because they accidentally signed the manassas City petition when they actually live in Prince William County.
Sadly, the reason for THOSE rules are to make it easy to validate signatures. It’s why when I collected signatures, I just walked around my neighborhood. That way, I knew where everybody lived and what district they were in. You can also do this easily at polling places, since you know the people are registered and live in the precinct.
I believe that they will get on the ballot. However, Newt blaming the team he hired for fraud should not matter to Virginia one bit. It is not Virginia’s problem that Newt Picked a fraudulent company.
Watching local Va. news for the last few days the final word on this looks to be they may have sessions/meetings on possibly changing this the next primary election.There are always two sides to every story but they seem to be holding they’re ground and saying this was the requirements.
people decrying that democrats can vote in our primary, in another thread people are attacking the RPV for attempting to stop democrats from voting in our primary.
============================================================From what I heard today, ‘they’ approved making all sign a Loyalty Pledge.
Which in itself is worthless because it is unenforceable.
That said, I will NOT be going to the primary election as I refuse to sign a ‘Loyalty Pledge’ because of above and I feel it is insulting - especially when the only reason I would vote for either candidate would be because they were the last on standing.
But they would definitely get my vote over the present “Occupy DC’er”.
Lets give everyone a bar of soap and declare we are going to
“Rid the country of BO”.
The Osborne suit was filed on Oct 24, 2011. So if the VA GOP issued the new 15,000 no-check rule in October (and not November), it had to be just before Halloween.
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