I can understand the frustration of numerous voters and bloggers to the state of the Virginia Republican Primary ballot. I just wish the frustrations were aimed in the right direction – at the incredibly incompetent or uninterested candidates.
Does 10,000 signatures sound like a lot? Sure it does, until one takes a look at the State Board of Elections’ rules – in particular, the start date for candidates to get signatures: July 1, 2011.
In other words, candidates had nearly six months to get this done. Even the 15,000 number that RPV used for “automatic” certification translates to less than 100 signatures a day statewide. With just one volunteer in each Congressional District, the candidates needed less than eight signatures per day per circulator to ensure they qualified for the ballot (Perry declared on August 13, so in his case, he needed just under 10.5 per day).
Am I really supposed to believe that candidates for president can’t find 11 volunteers throughout the state of Virginia, or that those volunteers couldn’t do eight signatures (or ten and a half in Perry’s case) a day? During my almost-candidacy for school board, I could get ten in less than an hour.
Fact is, no candidate not named Romney or Paul had the dedication or forethought to make sure they made it on the ballot. That’s on them, not the State Board or the RPV.
Here’s the reality: there are only two serious candidates for president left. The rest have been proven to be pretenders, pure and simple.
Filed under: 2012 Elections, Republican Party of Virginia, Republicans, Virginia Politics
Couldn’t agree with you more, D.J. Thanks for breaking down the numbers to put the “conflict” into perspective.
Well put. Once you learn that neither Perry nor Gingrich even started collecting signatures until November, I don’t see how you can consider anything other than their own fault
Agreed. Romney folks were at Loudoun County GOP meetings months ago collecting signatures.
I’m sorry that people who are upset about the fact that we have no good candidates to vote for are “whining.” Many of us ‘whiners’ find this herding of Virginia Republican primary voters into one of these two camps to be completely unacceptable.
Once again, it is equally fair to make the point that those candidates who catch on later in the process and who do not have millions of dollars at their disposal on July 1 are at a disadvantage.
It takes millions of dollars to find 11 volunteers to get 8 signatures a day? C’mon VAP, you’re insulting your own intelligence.
There is no herding. We just have a host of incompetent Presidential campaigns this year. It’s sad.
I’m not….nor will I be …herded. I will work tirelessly outside of the process now. Way to go, RPV. You seem to well on your way to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The rules were clear, that hadn’t changed. Anybody whose campaign was as organized as Al Sharpton’s or Dennis Kucinich’s in 2008 would have gotten on the ballot. That doesn’t seem like the bar was placed all that high.
I think this is the first time I’ve agreed with Steve Vaughan.
You DO know when the rules were changed, don’t you?
Seem harmless to you? They screwed the pooch on this deal. And it’ll cost us….dearly.
I agree with Monk. No one can say that our party or our candidates will benefit from this. It will be a very costly mistake, and not just monetarily.
The rules were *not* changed. 10K was the threshhold then, and it’s the threshhold now. The only thing new was the breezy review of anyone who had 15K or more. If you’d rather the party go through all of Romney’s signatures with a fine-toothed comb, be my guest. It won’t add any names to Gingrich or Romney.
I agree with DJ- this is misplaced blame. Who do you think set these rules you loathe so? Not RPV, it turns out. It’s the General Assembly.
These rules were not a problem at all until this year. Why? Too many weak sister candidates. If you can’t get a measley 10,000 signatures how could we expect you to get 3.5 million votes in November?
Gingrich especially has little credibility complaining given that he failed to make the Missouri ballot also (which apparently required filling out and signing some forms and paying $1000).
And yet, the voters are still left to be told who they have to vote for. That is entirely undemocratic. If there is no write-in, the RPV will leave thousands, if not millions, of Virginians hanging, not allowed their basic right to select whom they feel would best represent them. If you want to punish the candidates by leaving their names off the ballots, fine, but don’t punish the voters too.
The problem is, it’s the candidates themselves who refused to give you a choice. 4 of them apparently did not think they’d even make it to this point and didn’t bother to turn in a single singature. Perry has a ton of money yet landed an epic fail on recruiting a dozen volunteers to competently gather petitions. Is that RPV’s fault? No, it’s Perry’s. Gingrich lives here, he REALLY should know better. But apparently his campaign had no organization and he started very late on this effort. 15k signatures would have guaranteed no problem. Stand in front of a Giant in each congressional district for a couple Saturdays for crying out loud! It’s not that hard. I am not a partisan for any presidential candidate, haven’t even made up my mind whjo to vote for yet, but you are placing blame in the wrong direction. If you have a problem with the law, change the law for future elections. But don’t blame a process everyone knew about yet did not heed!
No, it is Virginia who failed to give us a choice. Sure, those candidates are asking to go down in flames by ignoring Virginia, but that should be up to Virginians to decide, not the RPV.
It’s not up to RPV. RPV did not set a 10,000 threashold.
The Missouri primary doesn’t count. It doesn’t bind a single delegate. It’s a beauty contest. I can understand why candidates wouldn’t bother with it.
If Romney’s and Paul’s petitions had been checked, and they failed to qualify too, that would send a message to Richmond that the laws need to change. Having only Romney and Paul on the ballot opens the party to call kinds of charges and conspiracy theories. It also keeps the vote down which is bad for the party.
Seriously, ballot access isn’t that hard. First, campaigns need to put one person in charge of it, preferably an attorney on the campaign staff, not outside counsel. That attorney then divides up the states into the method for getting on the ballot — petitions, filing fees, etc. The attorney should then forward all the petition requirements to the campaign manager who can set the wheels in motion in each state while the attorney fills out the paperwork and requests the checks for filing fees in the other states. At least that’s the way that I did it as someone fresh out of law school and it worked pretty well.