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.
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.