In other words the required amount was met but the VA GOP decided in November that you had to have 15,000 in order to keep your signatures from being checked.
The only two who qualified ran last election (and you will notice all the candidates were on the ballot in 2008) so it's clear the VA GOP is screwing this up.
Either check Romney and Pauls signatures too or put Newt and Perry on the ballot since they met the initial requirements.
My guess is if the checked Pauls signatures, the only person left on the ballot would be MItt Romney or are we to believe Ron Paul has enough registered Republican support in every congressional district to qualify. I doubt it.
How bad would the VA GOP look when the only choice for it's voter is Mitt Romney and you can't even write in who you would like to vote for?
The RPV bears some fault but there's a lot of misinformation.
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 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.