I thought I read that many of Newt signatures were completely missing adresses. That said, I think an equal protection lawsuit could at least force the verification of Paul and Romney petitions.
I have not had the opportunity to look into the reports of Newts disqualification.
I did however, watch the perry disqualification as it was parsed out to us last night by the media in dribs and drabs with all kinds of innuendo and no facts.
Are you saying that Paul and Mitt's signatures were not held to the same verification standards or even scrutinized like the rest?
If that's true, were in worse shape than I thought.
I’m not surprised if true, a lot of people don’t like giving addresses, but they are required so they can check that the signature matches someone who lives in the appropriate district.
The problem with any complaint about the rules being “too hard” is that Romney and Ron Paul both managed to qualify under those rules. If NOBODY qualified, you could make the argument. If Romney had gotten in with the 15,000-signature exception, but nobody else had, again you might have an argument.
But Ron Paul managed to get 10,000 valid signatures with addresses, and survived the verification.
Perry and Gingrich needed better staff workers, and they needed to reach out to the locals. I signed up for both campaigns and sent them e-mails reminding them of this requirement and asking how I could sign petitions. Neither got back to me until Wednesday when Gingrich had a blast e-mail about a 1-day blitz which was thursday before Christmas — good luck with that.
If they had been organized, all they needed was 44 volunteers, four in each district, to sit at to popular republican polling places in each district to collect signatures.
For example, at MY precinct, we had 932 republican voters. One volunteer, getting less than half the voters, could have gotten 400 signatures on any petition (Herman Cain had petitions at the polls, but no other candidate). 4 polling places could give you 1600 votes per district, and nearly 17000 total — more than enough.
We already had a republican representative at the polling place, who would have happily collected signatures for any candidate, but only Cain asked. So this was not a big deal, except the candidate committees in the state didn’t apparently put the work in.