The Tennessee Secretary of State says that five independent presidential petitions have enough valid signatures:
1. Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party)
2. Jill Stein (Green Party)
3. Rocky De La Fuente (independent)
4. Alyson Kennedy (Socialist Workers Party)
5. Mike Smith (independent)
The Secretary of State rejected these six petitions:
1. Darrell Castle (Constitution Party)
2. James Germalic (independent)
3. Kyle Kopitke (independent)
4. David Limbaugh (independent)
5. Evan McMullin (Better for America)
6. Emidio Soltysik (Socialist Party)
Some of these results had already been announced. It is very surprising that Darrell Castle’s petition was rejected. It contained 500 signatures, and was circulated by motivated volunteers. Castle lives in Tennessee. He will be seeking to re-validate signatures. The Secretary of State says Castle’s petition only had 232 valid signatures. The requirement is 275 signatures.
Mike Smith lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Here is his web page.
Jim Hedges petitioned in Tennessee, and probably had enough valid signatures, but just before he submitted his petition, two of his presidential elector candidates changed their mind and said they would not serve, and they refused to sign the candidacy document.
Based on signature averages, Castle should have made it.
In the past, Tennessee has rejected independent presidential petitions but then when the candidate looked at the results, the candidate was able to persuade the state that it had erred. I can’t remember which candidate that was, but it was in one of the last three or four presidential elections.
I wonder what’s going on, first Ohio and now Tennessee? States rejecting high amounts of signatures.
Yeah, that is a surprise.
Why would an elector bail? I couldn’t imagine it’s that much of a commitment.
I don’t understand how it is possible for a political party to fail to meet a 275 signature minimum other than to so drastically underestimate the validity rate or have incompetent people doing it.
It some of both. Some volunteers will think “the next person can get the rest of the signatures”, or they don’t realize 40 percent of the signatures will be canceled by the voting officials for whatever reason.
I am hesitant to even comment on this other than to say that I (along with many of you, I’d bet) can fairly easily get that many signatures just by myself in a weekend. All you have to do is either go to events (fairs, street festivals, parades) or go door-to-door using a voter registration list. On several occasions, I have collected 350 signatures in one day using multiple and double-sided clip boards. This is not difficult, folks. All you have to do is plan the work and work the plan. And by the way, I am talking quality signatures here. My validity rate is over 70% and close to 80% if door-to-door.
This is clear evidence of poor planning by the Castle campaign!
I needed 20 sigs to run for local office and I had 30 just walking through my neighborhood, took no time at all. And they accepted almost all of them. A few CP loyalists should had been able to knock that out in a weekend.
Just wondering, when was the last time the Socialist Workers Party got on the ballot in Tennessee?
It is a shame Mimi didn’t make the ballot. Happy for the SWP though.
Michael, good question. The SWP presidential candidate was last on the Tennessee ballot in 1992.
The Socialist Party’s Soltysik/Walker presidential campaign submitted 377 signatures, among which only 191 were found valid.
The process by which Tennessee’s SOS verifies the signatures is by emailing copies of the petition to the clerk of each signature-listed county. Each county clerk then checks only the particular signatures which have that clerk’s county name listed, and emails back the number thereof which were found to be valid. Due to the way that signature lines are formatted on the petition, however; signers regularly make the mistake of writing their zip codes on the ‘county’ line instead of their counties. Accordingly, no county clerk ever identifies those signatures to be from his/her jurisdiction; thus resulting in those signatures never being checked or reported in any county’s verified total. Mst likely that factor was also the main hindrance to the Constitution Party’s valid-signature count.
Rejecting a large number of signatures is not new. This happened to us Libertarians in 2012. We submitted a large number but the collection of those signatures was faulty and a very high percentage were rejected. We made a last ditch effort within the last 24 hours to collect the remaining signatures. We made it on the ballot by the skin of our teeth.