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."
There's no indication they aren't. How would we know? He conveniently got over 15,000 signatures and a last minute rule that only the under-15,000's would be checked. I'm not buying it. Way too fishy. Sorry, I know you've tried to save face for the RPV, but there really is no excuse to disenfranchise voters.
“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.”
Wasn’t there some lawsuit in October that that scared them into checking with more vigour this primary cycle or something? All this is very confusing. I have yet to see a good timeline of how it all went down. Your posts have been informative.
Freegards
I'd rather have 10,000 candidates to choose from than not have a choice at all. Here's a novel idea, why not do what other states do. The other 49 states don't seem to have this issue and neither do they have 1,000's of candidates on their ballots.
Yes, and even that was still too late to escape any blame- but far better than November!
Late-starting would-be candidates needed to make an all-out effort at our nov 8 elections.
They bear fault for not doing so and the RPV bears fault for not giving them more warning before the elections.
It’s up to Virginia.”””
It is also against the law in Virginia to have write in votes.
This makes everything even more of a “pushed us into a corner” problem, IMO.
“The Washington Examiner says Perry did not submit enough sigs yet Perry’s team says it’s been common knowledge that Perry submitted just under 12,000 and Newt submitted just over 11,000.”
this actually doesnt surprise me
Gingrich had zero groub game ubtil very recently heck he failed to get on MO ballot so i am not surprised they flubbed more.
Perry looks like a bufoon whose campaign has been stuck in damage control since its launch
not hard to believe they didnt get on the VA ballot
The rule was not last-minute, it was done in October, 2 months before the signatures were due.
And of course, having a rule that makes it easier to get on the ballot would hardly “disenfranchise voters”. What argument are we discussing, that it was too easy for Romney because he got 15,000 signatures, or too hard for Gingrich because his signatures were checked? The 15,000 signature “rule” was a time-saving measure for the RPV, and didn’t in any way make it harder to get on the ballot. In the absense of that rule, every candidate would have all the signatures checked, and Gingrich and Perry would still be out.
I have no doubt that a review of Romney’s signatures would find 10,000 valid ones.
I still have found no indication that the suit had anything to do with any rules. And there certainly is nothing to suggest the 15,000 signature rule was in response to the suit.
I know that people have speculated that the RPV is only checking signatures because of that suit. But I exchanged e-mails with the prior RPV chair, and he confirms that they checked every signature and address for the 2009 state election — checking is NOT something they just started. To clarify, the 2009 signatures were for qualification for a convention, but the process is the same.
He could not confirm whether they checked in 2008 presidential primary though, since he became the chair after that primary. And of course, he could not confirm whether the RPV was planning on NOT checking this time, and then decided to check because of the suit. All I can say for certain is that this is NOT the first time they have paid attention to signature requirements.
I will also point this out — Gingrich has claimed that of his 11,000 submitted signatures, 1500 were fraudulent, because of a paid contractor. That means by his own admission, his campaign only submitted at most 9500 actual signatures.
The only way he would be on the ballot would be if the RPV simply accepted the signatures without regard to their validity. Knowing now that 1500 were forged, do you think they were right to check, or was it bad?
If you found out that Romney had forged 6000 signatures, so in fact his total was under 10,000, would you argue that he should still be on the ballot since he turned in papers with 10000 signatures?
I think there is a difference between having gotten 12000 different people to sign your forms, and then learning that more than 2000 of them signed the wrong forms, or weren’t registered (which is what we believe happened to Perry), and submitting 11000 signatures and finding that 1500 of them weren’t actually signed at all. Would you agree with that as well?
Just a few thousand more fraudulent signatures, and Newt would be on the ballot.
What a screwed up system Virginia Republicans are running.
Doesn’t matter, the rule was done in the middle of the process when they were already supposed to be collecting signatures. That gives an unfair advantage to people who may have been further along in the signature collection process. Some may have postponed doing it, believing they’d only need 10,000.
As I understand it, the signatures were NEVER checked before. The check against addresses was instituted in October for those submitting less than 15,000. That made it harder for anyone to avoid the check. Before that you only needed 10,000 and there was no check.
As I’ve already said, I confirmed with the previous RPV chair that they checked signatures completely in 2009. This wasn’t the first time — I know you read that somewhere, there has been a lot of mis-information.
There was no “rule change”. I know people use the word “rule”, and I’ve taken to using it as well. But the rule is as the rule always is — 10,000 signatures of registered voters.
What you are talking about is the procedure for checking the signatures. The RPV in October, once they knew the schedule and realized they had to check all the signatures in 5 days over Christmas, decided that they would not bother checking individual signatures if the candidate turned in 15,000 or more.
Theoretically, this didn’t give anybody an “unfair advantage”, because the rules were always “10000 good signatures”. As the RPV explained, they have never seen a case where 33% of the signatures were rejected, so the assumption is that if you had 15,000 signatures, checking them wouldn’t serve a purpose — they’d find enough.
To say the rules “favored” those who turned in more signatures is true, in that you always have bad signatures, and the more you get, the less likely it is that you will end up with fewer than 10,000. The 15,000 rule was really for the volunteers — if you could get the candidates to turn in that many, it saved the volunteers time and got them home quicker.
The Ron Paul case illustrates the wisdom of their rule. Paul ended up just short of 15,000, so he had all of his signatures checked. He had no trouble getting 10,000 valid signatures.
As to your comment that “some believed they’d only need 10,000” the fact is that ALL of them only needed 10,000, but they had to be VALID. They couldn’t just submit any 10,000 signatures. The 15,000 wasn’t a new harder requirement, it was just a way to ensure that they had 10,000.
I think your argument is based on the premise that before, they didn’t check any and if you turned in 10,000 you were in. But that is a faulty premise, so far as I can tell. They checked in 2009, and I have seen no actual evidence that they didn’t check in 2008.
Now, we know Newt Gingrich has said that 1500 of his signatures were in fact NOT collected, but were forged. Not collected from people who turned out to be not registered, but faked by a collector. If that collector had never turned in the fake signatures, Gingrich would have had fewer than 10,000, and wouldn’t have submitted at all. And you can’t say Gingrich would have collected more — they knew about the 15,000 “rule” for 2 months, and certainly all the candidates were working to get as many signatures as possible. Gingrich didn’t stop two days early because he had “enough”.
So, now that we KNOW that Gingrich did not actually collect 10,000 signatures from actual people, does that matter? Are we still supposed to be upset that they checked the signatures, or would we instead WANT that Gingrich was on the ballot because his team had 1500 forged signatures, and Santorum was NOT because his team did NOT forge enough signatures to get 10,000?
Doesn’t Gingrich’s admission that he had a collecter forge his signatures actually VALIDATE the RPV checks? Isn’t there a difference between “I asked 10,000 people if they could vote, and collected their signatures, but it turned out some didn’t know they weren’t registered” and “I collected 9500 signatures from people who said they were registered, and then a collector forged the rest”?
How can we fault the RPV for checking signatures, when we now know that Gingrich did not get 10,000 individual signatures?
Most of the state would prefer Newt or Perry. So why not put them on the ballot ? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep the guy leading in the state off the ballot, Newt. And a guy who would probably do well Perry. Huckabee was second and had almost 200,000 votes in the last one, even though it was pretty obvious, he was not going to be the nominee. This doesn’t make any sense for the GOP of Virginia.
You’re saying they checked addresses in 2008, not just names?
If they don’t win in the Courts and the nomination is still at issue, then the credentials committee at the convention refuse to seat the delegates chosen by this method.
The 2007 VA GOP memo for the 2008 primary asked for volunteers to do a manual ‘hard count’ of the sheets. The volunteers basically eyeballed each sheet to toss out obvious fakes like ‘Mickey Mouse’.
The VA GOP has said no more than 33% of sigs were ever discarded using the non-computer method.
Newt and Perry’s sigs were apparently checked using a new computer-based system to cross reference of names and addresses against voter rolls.
It appears the computer program was quite picky, as Perry’s count dropped from 12000 to 6000 (50% disqualification rate).
We dont know what Mitt’s disqualification number would have been under the new system.
Why? They did not negotiate the gate that every other pol running in VA must. Why are they different? Why are you so anxious to give them a pass? Gingrich is owned by Pelosi and Perry is simply another RINO opportunist. I don’t see anything about them that is anything but bad for America.
What we need to fix the country is a principled conservative. I’m not looking for perfect. I’m looking for a person who understands there is right and wrong and that The Constitution and Capitalism is what made America great. Indeed, everywhere those philosophies are tried ordinary people prosper. Marxism (and its derivatives), on the other hand, have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.
And before you Gingrich and Perry bots get on my case, tell me what part of what I said above is not true.
I’ve seen no actual testimony or report that verifies your claim that they basically “eyeballed” each sheet in 2008. I don’t know where that comes from — not from the RPV, and not from any source I can identify.
I have also not seen verification that there was some new computer program, or that the problem with ballots was address mis-matches.
We know that Gingrich’s problem with ballots was that he had a paid operative who forged 1500 signatures. That’s not an “address” problem, that a “fake signature” problem. If the eyeballing wouldn’t catch that, then eyeballing isn’t a good process, because we certainly want to catch cases where a candidate turns in fake signatures just to get on the ballot.
Without the 1500 fake signatures, Gingrich did not have enough signatures to qualify, with or without good addresses. You can only put him on the ballot if you believe it is OK for a candidate to pay an operative to forge signatures. I have a hard time believing anybody but a Newt Gingrich supporter would argue for that now, and I doubt the Newt people would accept that if it was ANY candidate other than Newt.
I’m saying the checked addresses in 2009. I can’t find any person directly involved in 2008 who is saying what they did then. I don’t have a relationship with the guy who ran the RPV in 2008, and I haven’t figured out who else to e-mail. I was able to verify they checked in detail in 2009, for the petitions to get into the nominating convention.
I know if I were running a check, I’d include addresses, although if they didn’t have a good electronic means of doing that, it may have been too hard in 2008.
Since the forms say addresses are required, and the VBE advised the campaigns that addresses are required, I don’t see why any candidate would think otherwise.
The problem I’m having with this argument is that I don’t see a problem with the RPV checking addresses, even if they didn’t in the last presidential election. It would explain why it was harder this time than last, but not how Ron Paul was able to get on the ballot while Perry and Gingrich could not. Paul had his addresses checked. And I’m sure if I had collected signatures, I would have gotten good addresses of real registered voters.
I would have been happy of course if they had not checked at all, and we could have just assumed all was well. I don’t like the outcome, but I’m not going to trash the RPV for doing what i believe to be a rational thing just because it turned out badly.
Newt’s campaign tweeted he had 12000-13000 (IIRC) just before everything fell apart. Perry’s campaign said they had 12000.
The 11500 that Newt’s campaign actually submitted was after his campaign pulled the bad 1500. (Newt said they caught it not the RPV.) I didnt see anything that it was after (though maybe it was).
Theres a 2007 memo from the RPV detailing the procedure last time. It was quoted over at Red State.
I agree that Newt and Perry screwed up (should have gotten the recommrnded 15000). Newt’s campaign is moving on. Perry should too.
I hadn’t heard Newt discuss catching an error. If that’s what happened, either he did a bad job of explaining his comments, or the news media did a bad job of reporting, or both.
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