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The Virginia GOP's rules do seem unfortunate. While candidates have been able to meet their requirements in the past, it doesn't make sense for requirements so stringent that serious candidates ever have serious trouble meeting them. Certainly, if I were a Virginia GOP primary voter, I would want the option to vote for the other candidates.
That being said, I'm not sure what legal recourse Perry has. State's have wide latitude to set election rules, and moreover this is an election for a nomination, not for a public office. Probably the ideal resolution from the GOP standpoint would be if the Virginia GOP backed down and voluntarily added the other candidates to the ballot.
Anyway, it's ironic that a Southern Governor who has tangled with the federal government regarding the Voting Rights Act is now asking a federal court to tell a Southern political party how to run its statewide election.
Here is a good article discussing irrational rules for primaries.
The Virginia Primary Ballot and the Absurdity of the SystemThe most obvious point here is that Romney, Gingrich, Perry, and Paul would seem to have better campaign organizations than the other candidates. Even Gingrich, whose ability to get on the ballot in several states had been in question, managed to pull this off.
The more interesting and important point, though, is the absurdity of the process.
It’s a core teaching of American Politics 101 classes that there are no national elections in the United States. President of the United States and Vice President of the United States are national offices but we elect our presidents and vice presidents via 51 state elections (counting DC, per the 23rd Amendment), each of which (as we learned quite painfully following the 2000 election) have their own rules.
The primaries are even more bizarre. Despite the fact that we’re choosing candidates for a national office, we have an arcane process wherein the two major parties set rules and then try to enforce them on 50-plus states, districts, and territories–often without much success. The various states and other delegate-awarding entities are in competition with each other for influence on the process. Those entities must contend with the traditions that put Iowa and New Hampshire in an absurdly favorable position and where South Carolina thinks it’s next in line. And, inexplicably, each of the entities sets conditions for ballot access that seem quite whimsical and have little relation to the national race and on timetables that have no real relation to the increasingly fluid primary calendar.
That the two major political parties don’t control the primary calendar for nominating their candidates is beyond silly. Worse, however, is the fact that they don’t even control who’s on the ballot for their highest office. In a rational system, candidates would simply have to qualify one time to get on the Republican presidential ballot. Instead, candidates have to spend an absurd amount of time and money getting petitions signed and jumping through other hoops set by states and other delegate-awarding entities.
Really the smart candidates--Bachmann--Huntsman & Santorum didn't even bother with the state of Virginia because of their irrational primary regulations.
Not only did a candidate have to collect 10K signatures--but 400 hundred of them had to be from each of the 11 districts in that state. Now while this may seem real easy to some folks--think about the districts in your own state that overwhelmingly consist of registered democrats?
So technically, in Virginia, you could meet your 10K signature requirement and then you could have 400 signatures coming out of 10 districts--miss the 11th because it consists of predominately registered democrats and still get booted off of the Virginia GOP primary ballot.
Rick Perry may have a point in this case--as this really disenfranchised many GOP primary voters in this state from being able to vote for their preferred candidate.
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