Last week, election-law attorney Christopher Nolen sent a letter to the State Board of Elections on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia, challenging the validity of the bulk of petition signatures submitted on behalf of Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson and vice presidential candidate James Gray.
Alleging various technical defects in the petitions and individual signatures, Nolen charged that only 4,485 of the more than 16,000 signatures turned in by the Libertarian Party were actually valid, far short of the 10,000 required statewide under the Code of Virginia.
The RPV’s challenge will be heard tomorrow morning at the regular meeting of the State Board of Elections, although what the SBE will (or can) do is somewhat mysterious. As ballot-law expert Richard Winger noted in Ballot Access News last week, “Virginia has no procedure for any outside group to challenge a finding of elections officials that a petition is sufficient.”
In response, tonight the Libertarian Party of Virginia sent out a press release meant to undercut the RPV’s challenge. (The full release is available as a PDF, here.)
Calling the Republican challenge “unprecedented,”
Chuck Moulton, chairman of the Libertarian Party of Virginia, asserted that “Republican elites are attempting to deny voters in Virginia their full range of choices when they go to vote in November.”
The release goes on to note that any legal challenge to the petitions could delay the process of approving and printing ballots, which could jeopardize Virginia’s adherence to a court order that resulted from a lawsuit filed by the McCain campaign in 2008 to ensure prompt availability of absentee ballots for overseas voters.
Quoting James Lark of Albemarle County, the release says:
“The LPVA submitted nearly 16,400 signatures on petitions to meet a requirement of 10,000 signatures statewide, including 400 valid signatures in each of 11 congressional district,” he said. “According to information from the State Board of Elections, election officials in counties and cities across the state identified a sufficient number of valid signatures to place LP presidential candidate Governor Gary Johnson and his running mate, Judge Jim Gray, on the 2012 ballot.”
Dr. Lark, who also coordinated the petition drives in 2004 and 2008, said this success rate tracks closely to those of previous years. “In 2008, LPVA presidential petitions had a validity rate of at least 74.7 percent; in 2004, our petitions had a validity rate of at least 76.6 percent.”
He said that in neither of those years, when the LPVA petitions were circulated by essentially the same voters as in 2012 and the petition process was supervised by the same party officials, did the Republican Party challenge the validity of the petitions.
Oddly, these validity percentages are a negative image of what the RPV alleges the validity rates of the 2012 petition drive to be — instead of about 75 percent valid signatures, the RPV says the LP has about 75 percent invalid.
Heating up the rhetoric, LPVA communications director Laura Delhomme adds in the release:
“When the Republican Party casts aspersions on the integrity of the Libertarian Party activists who collect petition signatures, it is also calling into question the integrity of the local Electoral Boards and General Registrars whose responsibility it is to verify the signatures. These same election officials,” Delhomme continued, “count the signatures on petitions submitted by Republican candidates for every office in Virginia, from school board and city council to governor and U.S. Senator.”
Delhomme asked: “Is the Republican Party of Virginia willing to submit its own numerous petitions to the same scrutiny it insists the Libertarian Party deserves? Is the Republican Party of Virginia willing to say that local Electoral Boards lack the necessary competence for counting and validating petition signatures, even though every Electoral Board in Virginia is controlled by Republicans? Does the Republican Party of Virginia believe that local registrars are unable to count petition signatures accurately, dispassionately, and competently?”
As I say, I’m not sure how the State Board of Elections will handle this matter at their meeting Tuesday morning, since this kind of challenge has never come before them previously.
On a related note, Constitution Party presidential candidate Virgil Goode pointed out in a speech in Buena Vista today that his own petitions are also being challenged by the RPV.
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