That’s ridiculous. You fill petition forms with fake names and addresses (or you copy them out of the phone book), and as long as you fill enough lines on the forms, no one will question that all the names were signed by the same person.
I’m sorry. It is presumed that if someone is a serious candidate to be the leader of the free world, that they won’t be making up names and throwing them on petitions just to get on the ballot.
Maybe that’s more trust than we should put in our candidates, but that is the point. We assume that some signatures won’t be valid, through no fault of the petitioner (the person who signs the affidavit that they witnessed the signatures). But it is assumed that 2/3rds would be good, so if you get 50% more than needed, you are OK.
And it’s also assumed that 66% of the people would know what district they were in.
This is all based on the fact that the person who COLLECTS the signatures will sign an oath on each petition that they personally witnessed the signatures and verified that they signers claimed to be in the district.
The people who check the signatures are all volunteers. Nobody really wanted to be sitting around 2 days before Christmas, and if you can get your candidates to collect 15,000 signatures and avoid that, what’s the problem?
We aren’t upset that some made the ballot, we are upset that some DIDN’T. Actually, when it was just Perry getting knocked off, most of those in THIS thread weren’t really all so upset, and some were positively giddy talking about how stupid Perry was not to get signatures.
But when it was their OWN candidate, suddenly it was a big conspiracy, and they had to fight the system, and, well, I won’t say what they sound like because I understand the frustration.