If Newt had gotten 15,000 signatures, he would have been exempt from the address checks too. And he could’ve hired anyone no matter how shady to collect the signatures, since they wouldn’t be checked. He lost the ground game on this one either due to a lack of time, money or both. Just getting 4,000 more signatures would have been easier than trying to fight the system and get the law or rules changed now.
I can see a big problem having a write-in option in a primary that’s open for both parties to vote in. What’s to stop the other party from rallying together and writing in their own candidate? Of course if they want to nominate a sure loser against Obama they’ve already got a couple good choices available on this ballot.
It sounds like the best option would be to waive the requirement on the address checks so that Newt’s signatures wouldn’t be thrown out. However, that could be unfair to the other candidates like Santorum. They may not have tried to collect signatures, feeling they couldn’t get enough to overcome the address checks. But it wouldn’t exactly be fair to extend the deadline for a couple of weeks when the other candidates had a big head start based on the old rules.
I hope our members in all of the states are signed up to be on Newt’s mailing list. I saw people on here claiming they were not contacted by the campaign to help out with signatures, but Newt said they did e-mail supporters on Monday and asked publicly for help on Tuesday. Granted, that’s a last-minute start. Newt’s larger mistake may be trying to run his campaign as a big money campaign when it should be run as a grass-roots campaign that gets supporters more involved.
““We barely made it in Ohio and we may barely make it Thursday in Virginia,” said Gingrich. “We’re asking all of our friends in Virginia to go to Newt.org and volunteer to get petitions signed in the next 48 hours.”
To that end, the campaign sent out an email to supporters Monday asking for help getting on the Virginia ballot. The email, which also announced Gingrich will himself be in Virginia Wednesday for a rally, asked supporters to get people out to one of nearly a dozen signature stations the campaign has set up in at least eight of the state’s 11 congressional districts.”
Actually, there’s no reason not to allow Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, et al, on the ballot, assuming they’re still in the race after the early primaries. There’s no doubt that they are legitimate Republican candidates.
Some of us got the “monday” e-mail on late tuesday afternoon, and it offered a location to sign that was closing in 2 hours and was TOWARD DC, so that you’d end up in commuter traffic to get back home. On the week before Christmas.
But at least he wrote — Perry’s campaign never said a word about it, so I assumed he had an organization collecting signatures, and didn’t need help. I did write and remind him about it, and said I’d sign if they told me where.