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Nope.

Article says it was fraudulent behavior on the part of 36 signature collectors and gives specifics of the ways the fraud was committed. I assume, since the names are known to authorities, that some sort of legal action may be taken.

The article also says that the candidates themselves were likely unaware of the fraud. Except for one case, there are no details on how many valid signatures each of the candidates were short to be qualified. And there was no information on how many of each candidate’s invalid signatures were supplied by the 36 fraudsters mentioned above.

Bad signatures, of course, are a well known problem of long standing. The standard solution, besides spot checking for obvious fraud when possible, has been to massively over-collect signatures with the expectation that the excess good signatures would be enough to cancel out the bad ones that slip through. However, signature collection, especially for state-wide offices, is a massive down-to-the-wire undertaking and shortcuts to save time are sometimes taken.

This is what makes the lack of information on the numbers so frustrating. What percentage of the shortfall can be traced back to these frauds? If it is only a small percentage that didn’t decide the issue, that’s one thing. If, on the other hand, the percentage was high enough to cause the candidate not to qualify for the primary, that is very damaging.

Damaging not only to the candidate, but also to the party’s ability to select the best candidate to run in the general election. In other words, the remaining candidates, the ones that did qualify, may simply have been outliers who had no chance of winning the primary. Unless something changes, one of them now is going to have to represent the party for the office in the general election.

This is a big deal because, among the five Republican candidates that did not qualify, there are several popular party front runners for governor.

And, just to stoke the fires of conspiracy a bit because …why not? What if some (or all) of the fraudsters were involved in a conspiracy to create enough invalid signatures so that particular candidates would fail to qualify to stand in the party primary? It would be a clever way to eliminate the strongest opponents without even having to oppose them in the actual election.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” ~ Sun Tzu