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?
You’re saying they checked addresses in 2008, not just names?
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.