Joan McCarter's excellent article got me thinking-- just how hard is it to get on Virginia's presidential primary ballot? For some hard data, I skipped over to Virginia's State Board of Elections website and poked around. While they don't provide a full list of candidates who've attempted to get on the ballot, I learned a lot from the past three election cycles. Spoiler alert: if you've got your act together, it's not that hard to get on the ballot. Read on.
A simple way to decide if it's difficult to get on the presidential primary ballot in Virginia is to look at some past elections to see how many candidates were able to do it. If it's a particularly cumbersome task, “among the most onerous in the nation,” as Rick Perry characterized it, one might expect to see only major candidates succeeding. If, on the other hand, the 10,000 signature requirement is achievable by any candidate who is sufficiently motivated and organized, one might expect to see a fairly wide range of candidates on the ballot-- including some with only modest popular and/or financial support. In fact, as the primary elections from 2000, 2004, and 2008 show, candidates from across the political spectrum have appeared on the primary ballot in Virginia, even some who got far fewer votes in the actual election than the number of signatures they were apparently able to collect.
In 2008 both the Democratic and Republican parties held primaries, and on each ballot there were six candidates: Obama, Kucinich, Clinton, Richardson, Biden, and Edwards for the Democrats, and Paul, McCain, Huckabee, Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney for the Republicans. A pretty wild bunch, I'd say. Fred Thompson-- totally forgot about him.
In 2004, only the Dems had a primary. In this election there were nine candidates: Sharpton, Kerry, Clark, Dean, Lieberman, Edwards, Kucinich, Gephardt, and Larouche. I'm going to go out on a limb here: if all of these guys managed to get on the ballot, it's doable.
Finally we have the year 2000. Only the Republicans had a primary in 2000, and this was the lineup: Keyes, Bauer, Bush, McCain, Forbes. It's worth noting that out of the 664,093 votes cast on election day, Bauer received 852.
To sum up: for the last three election cycles, a broad spectrum of candidates, Republicans and Democrats, managed to follow the directions laid out by the Virginia State Board of Elections (which, by the way, are very clear.) Twenty-six people, some of them fringier than fringe, had the discipline and organization to get the job done.
If Perry and Gingrich want to whine about how "onerous" the process is, that's their right (though what's truly onerous is the number of voter suppression attempts currently in progress.) I'm not even going to get into Gingrich's Pearl harbor "analogy" because it's New Year's Eve and I don't want to make myself throw up. But apparently the truth is that Perry and Gingrich couldn't succeed at what even the most marginal candidates have been able to do.