I don’t want to get in with the conspiracists or the whiners.
But I did want to explain what makes this job so hard. The issue isn’t simply collecting signatures, although 10,000 signatures is a lot of signatures — we can see that Wisconsin had no trouble tons of signatures for their recall efforts, so you can do it if you really work at it.
We don’t have party registration, and the RPV and local candidates guard their mailing lists, so it’s not easy to target voters.
The rules about the signatures are onerous. For example, we have 100+ counties and cities. Each petition submitted must have signatures for ONLY ONE political entity, be it a county or a city. So you need to have 100+ sets of petitions. Then, for some of those counties, there are more than one district, so you’d need sets of petitions for each district in each county.
Each petition has to be double-sided. That isn’t as bad as it was a few years ago, it’s easy to do double-sided these days. Each petition has to be handled by a person who is old enough to vote in our state, and otherwise eligible to vote (but not registered). The people signing have to be registered.
Each petition has to be signed and notarized for the person collecting the signatures.
The signers have to affirm that they will be voting in our primary.
So you can’t just camp out at the metro and collect signatures. You’ll get people in different districts, in different counties, registered and not, and who won’t want to say they are voting in the primary. You need their full address, and their full signed name, and the form ASKS for 4 digits of their SS even though that is optional.
When I collected signatures in 2008, I don’t remember getting a notary for my Fred Thompson signatures. I’m guessing they notarized it later (which would be improper, but I didn’t know the rules). The Romney team sent a guy to collect the petitions who WAS a notary, and I signed the page in front of him so he could stamp it.
The easiest way to collect signatures is to show up on election day. Then you know the people are registered, are republicans, and live in the county and vote in the district.
This year was slightly harder because of redistricting. Some people still don’t know what district they are in.
I’m not making excuses for candidates, but I do understand how hard it is. Romney and Paul did it somehow, and I don’t think they were forging signatures. They just started early and worked at it.