Posted on December 22, 2011
A certain number of petition signatures had to be delivered by close of business today in order for candidates to be included on the ballot for the March 6 Virginia Republican primary.
Rick Santorum supporter Lisa Graas just informed me by e-mail that, according to University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato, three candidates — Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman — failed to collect enough signatures in time to meet the qualifying deadline.
UPDATE: Andrew Cain of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:
Four Republican presidential candidates – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Ron Paul — submitted paper work in time to qualify for Virginia’s March 6 primary ballot. . . .
Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Sen. Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman did not submit signatures with Virginia’s State Board of Elections by today’s 5 p.m. deadline.
Those who submitted the required signatures must clear another hurdle. The Republican Party of Virginia has until Tuesday to certify which candidates qualify. . . .
The State Board of Elections will turn over the petitions to the respective political parties for validating. Republican will begin the process Friday morning and have sought volunteers to help with the process.
Candidates must submit the signatures of at least 10,000 registered voters, with 400 from each of the 11 Congressional districts.
Romney submitted 16,026 signatures; Paul 14,361; Perry 11,911 and Gingrich 11,050.
UPDATE II: NBC’s Alex Moe reports:
The Gingrich campaign might be able breathe a sigh of relief.
After Newt Gingrich’s third event in less than 24 hours in Virginia, the former House speaker announced that his campaign has secured enough signatures to be on the ballot in the state.
Notice that Perry also barely cleared the 10,000-signature threshold. As Lisa Graas notes below, because some signatures will prove ineligible, it is recommended that candidates get at least 15,000 signatures to qualify. If Romney wants to dispatch lawyers to keep an eye on the validation process, they might be able to disqualify enough petitions to knock Perry and Gingrich off the ballot.
UPDATE III: Hat tip to The Right Scoop on Twitter for this Politico article by Emily Schultheis adding further background:
The state’s primary, which is slated for Super Tuesday on March 6, has some of the most stringent ballot access requirements in the country: 10,000 signatures from registered Virginia voters, including 400 from each of the state’s 11 congressional districts. And the elections board recommends getting at least 1.5 times the number of required signatures — 15,000 for presidential candidates — in case any of them are found to be invalid.
Mitt Romney, who filed Tuesday, was the only candidate to get 1.5 times the required number of signatures . . .
The Gingrich campaign had announced yesterday, after “scrambling” to organize in the state, that it had reached the required number of signatures.
The state parties will certify the signatures from each of the candidates and decide by Dec. 27 whether or not the four GOP candidates are eligible to appear on the ballot, Piper said.
UPDATE IV: OK, we’ve nailed down the facts. Now for the big-picture “What Does It Mean?” stuff that’s usually above my paygrade. (Because it’s Thursday evening three days before Christmas, all the super-genius Smart Guy pundits in D.C. are off the clock, so I’ll give it a shot.)
The Right Scoop says, “I wonder if they struggled to get the 10k signatures needed.” And yeah, of course that was the situation.
On a conference call with grassroots supporters last week, a top Santorum staffer had discussed ballot-access issues in several states. Virginia was singled out as a tough one, because of the “stringent” factor described in the Politico article: Not just the 10,000-signature minimum, but you have to get 400 signatures in each of 11 congressional districts, and the deadline hit in the middle of the holiday season, at the same time that the campaigns were going all-out in Iowa.
The Santorum people on the conference call were asking for Virginia volunteers to help with their ballot-access drive, saying they were hoping for a “Christmas miracle.” Given the low-budget situation with the Santorum campaign, they had no other choice but rely on volunteers. (Romney, of course, could afford to hire professional ballot-access people.)
Contrast Santorum’s situation to the ballot shortfalls by Huntsman and Bachmann — both of whom have raised and spent multiples of Santorum’s campaign budget — and Santorum’s shortfall in Virginia, while certainly disappointing, is not nearly as embarrassing as the others.
The fact that Gingrich was “scrambling” to hit the 10,000-signature threshold in Virginia shows the gap between his high-profile “front-runner” status and the relative weakness of his campaign operation.
But certainly the biggest question mark is why Perry could only get about 900 more Virginia signatures than Newt. The Perry campaign had millions of dollars cash-on-hand in early September, and has unloaded a huge amount on TV ads the past month, yet they barely cleared the Virginia ballot threshold? That doesn’t bode well.
So, yeah: Romney’s now looking a bit more likely as the nominee.
UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
Now that I think about it, a wild-card idea: If we assume a four-way Virginia primary between Romney, Newt, Perry and Paul — that is to say, if Romney’s big-money lawyers can’t disqualify either Newt or Perry — could Ron Paul win Virginia?
Think about it: Gingrich and Perry waging an all-out knife-fight to be the “Not Mitt” conservative candidate, both of them taking their shots at Romney. Meanwhile, Paul’s army of fanatics descend on the Old Dominion to turn out every possible libertarian/Constitutionlist/fringe-kook vote. In a four-way primary, if the other three candidates run in the 20%-30% range, couldn’t a maximum effort by the Paulistas produce a shocking upset in Virginia?
War-gaming these crazy possibilities is such fun, isn’t it?
UPDATE VI: Now a Memeorandum thread. I’m sitting here with Fox News on the TV in my home office, and they haven’t even mentioned this story yet. Everything’s all, “Congressional compromise, blah, blah, blah, Iraq, blah, blah, blah.” Maybe they don’t grasp the significance. Probably because their super-genius Smart Guy pundits are all on holiday this week.
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