GOP criticized on signatures for Va. primary

Poorly trained volunteers who reviewed presidential candidates' petitions at state GOP headquarters Dec. 23 arbitrarily knocked out "pages and pages and pages" of signatures, according to a screener who was in the room.

"This was not some surgical operating room staffed by highly trained people," William E. Wilkin, a Loudoun County high school history teacher, said Monday in a telephone interview. "This was a murky thing. It's just very, very unsettling."

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Rep. Ron Paul are the only candidates who qualified for Virginia's March 6 presidential primary. The Republican Party of Virginia excluded former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, saying they failed to amass the required 10,000 signatures of registered Virginia voters.

Process aside, by their own admission Gingrich and Perry did not meet the state's requirements. In his emergency motion for an injunction, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Richmond, Perry said he submitted the signatures of "more than 6,000 qualified Virginia voters." In Iowa last week, Gingrich told a voter that his campaign had submitted 11,100 signatures in Virginia, but "1,500 of them were by one guy who frankly committed fraud."

Jonathon A. Moseley, a Reston lawyer and tea party activist, filed suit last week in Richmond Circuit Court, asking that a judge determine Gingrich's eligibility for the primary. On Monday, Moseley released a statement of Wilkin's misgivings, saying they bolster his challenge to state GOP procedures.

Wilkin, previously a Foreign Service officer at the State Department and a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in the telephone interview that he had sent his statement to Howie Lind, chairman of the 10th District Republican Committee, and to Virginia Republican National Committeeman Morton Blackwell days before Moseley came across it.

Wilkin said he helped review petitions at Republican Party headquarters in Richmond on Dec. 23 from about 1:30 p.m. until about 10:45 p.m. The state GOP announced on Twitter at 6:03 p.m. that Perry did not have enough valid signatures to qualify. At 2:39 the next morning, the state GOP announced that Gingrich had failed to qualify.

In his Dec. 27 statement, Wilkin asked the leadership of the state GOP and the party's Rules Committee to certify Perry and Gingrich for the primary ballot.

"First, it is hard to defend the fact that none of the Romney signatures were individually verified, but the Perry and Gingrich signatures were subjected to full scrutiny," Wilkin wrote.

"It may be an announced policy" to use a different standard for a candidate, such as Romney, who submitted more than 15,000 signatures, "but it is hard to defend to the general public."

He added: "I suggest that the Romney signatures may not have survived the type of scrutiny given to the other candidates if all petitions had been treated equally."

Wilkin wrote that volunteer screeners were given no list of official reasons for disallowing a signature. "Various volunteers made peculiar and idiosyncratic judgments to disallow signatures."

In the phone interview, Wilkin said "it wasn't a pretty process" and added that "everybody was just doing their own thing."

In his statement, Wilkin wrote that several volunteers failed to perform a secondary name search if the address search failed. He added that several volunteers "routinely disallowed a signature if it was on a page with a heading from another county," even though "the petition itself states that such headings are only advisory."

Several volunteers routinely disallowed signatures if the complete name of the voter was not on the signature line, he added. "Such things are not grounds to disallow signatures. There was no consistency."

Wilkin wrote that once any single volunteer disallowed a signature, "no one ever even spot-checked the reason."

Wilkin said the approximately 30 volunteers who reviewed the petitions had received "less than one minute" of training.

"Several of the older volunteers were not computer savvy," he wrote. "Even keyboarding skills and accuracy matter in this kind of search. Without any double-check of the disallowed signatures, their sincere and unintentional computer mistakes may very well have affected the outcome of this process."

Wilkin wrote that there was no lawyer present for the state GOP to advise volunteers who had questions about signatures and petitions. "The volunteers really needed better advice," he said. "I have no idea how many signatures were improperly, recklessly or carelessly disallowed."

State GOP officials have said that the presidential campaigns had observers in the room during the vetting of the signatures. It's unclear how many were lawyers.

In the phone interview, Wilkin said he is dismayed that voters will have only two choices in the primary. "It seems to me as if somebody didn't bring in their homework — and we're closing the school."

Wilkin noted Monday that on Dec. 12, he chaired a meeting of what he and the two other participants called the "Gingrich Committee for Loudoun County." Wilkin said all three were supporters of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum but hoped to help give voters another choice on the March 6 ballot. Wilkin said he signed a petition for Gingrich in November, but that the Gingrich campaign had nothing to do with his statement.

After Perry filed his ballot-access suit in U.S. District Court last week, state GOP Chairman Pat Mullins issued a brief statement, saying: "I complied with Virginia law by certifying the candidates who met the statutory requirement."

State GOP spokesman Garren Shipley said in a statement Monday: "We strongly disagree with the characterization of events put forward by Mr. Wilkin. Due to the pending suit, we are unable to comment further."