On December 26, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli wrote in his own newsletter that he recommends that the legislature lower the presidential primary petition requirement. Specifically, he advocates that the current 10,000 requirement be changed so that only 1,100 signatures are required, with at least 100 from each U.S. House district. See here. Thanks to Tony Roza and Carey Campbell for this news.
On January 17, a U.S. District Court in Virginia will hear arguments in Lux v Judd, which challenges the Virginia ballot access law that circulators for district office must live in that district. It will be interesting to see if the recent commentary on Virginia presidential primary ballot access influences the oral argument at that hearing.
Found some interesting stuff from 2007 from Red State archives about the validation of signatures and papers, which seem to indicate that the procedural validation was rigorous for 2008 Republican primaries already, so the improved address validation brought by that Osborne case in November didn’t most likely have that much effect, since the 2008 procedural validation alone would have most likely brought Perry and Gingrich below 10k.
There was full check for any mistakes in signatures and forms and procedures in 2008, and if after those the total of valid signatures fell below 10.5k or 450 per district, they were checked against RPV’s official voter list, if opposing campaign wanted to challenge those results and pay for the official voter list comparison. From what we have heard, it was the procedural validation alone that brought both Perry below 10k, so they would have been out by these rules also.
This is probably why the all 6 Republican campaigns who got to the ballot collected those 15k signatures, the key persons knew the rules and collected what they were asked to collect.
http://images.redstate.com/files/Guidelines%20for%20Observers.pdf
http://images.redstate.com/files/Guidelines%20for%20Petition%20Verification.pdf
http://images.redstate.com/files/RPV%202008%20Presidential%20Primary%20Petition%20Verification.pdf
Here is observer invitation that was sent to some people:
From: Matt Wells
Sent: Fri Dec 14 17:59:22 2007
Subject: Petition Verification
All,
This email is to notify you that the Party has collected your petitions from the State Board of Elections.
First off, congratulations on making it through a grueling process! Now that you’ve done the hard part, we just need to verify the petitions.
We will be conducting verification at RPV HQ (115 E. Grace St, Richmond) beginning at 9:45am on Monday, December 17th. We will be doing a hard count for number of signatures based on correctness of form (see attached documents for details).
We’ve got about 40 folks coming in to help with the count, so it should proceed fairly quickly. You all are more than welcome to have one or two folks present as observers.
I will be out of town next week, so please direct any questions to either Christian Curto or Erika Fischer (copied on this email, or available at 703-254-**** and 757-618-****, respectively), who will be supervising the count.
I hope you’ll take the time to review the attached documents, so that we can get through this as rapidly and smoothly as possible. It is the goal of the Party to qualify your candidates for the ballot, but we do have an obligation to make sure that the legal requirements have been met.
Thanks,
Matt
Matthew Wells
Political Director – Central
Republican Party of Virginia
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