Gingrich's Fraud Claim Actually Makes Him Look Worse

As I've pointed out in previous posts, the GOP has had a lot of trouble getting it's presidential candidates on the ballot for the 2012 primary in Virginia. Not only did several of the big candidates fail to even turn in signature petitions, but Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were actually disqualified from the ballot because thousands of their signatures were declared invalid. With that being said, it looks like Perry and Gingrich are taking two different approaches to explaining why they weren't able to make the ballot.

Rick Perry has decided to sue for access to the ballot. In Virginia, petition circulators (the people collecting the signatures) have to be Virginia residents and eligible to vote. Perry claims that this is unconstitutional and it's the reason his campaign was unable to reach the required amount of signatures. I think this is an interesting issue to look at and I've heard a lot of campaigns express frustration over it in the past, but I don't see this actually getting resolved before the Virginia primary.

While Perry actually brings up a point that is worth debate (even if I'm not sure where I stand on the validity of the argument), the former speaker claims the only reason he didn't make the ballot is because a paid campaign staffer actually submitted almost 1,500 fraudulent petitions.

Gingrich's campaign hired workers to gather those signatures, and the former speaker of the House of Representatives said at a campaign stop that one of those workers had committed fraud.

"We hired somebody who turned in false signatures. We turned in 11,100 - we needed 10,000 - 1,500 of them were by one guy who frankly committed fraud," Gingrich said, according to CNN.

Gingrich is obviously trying to dismiss this issue as something his supporters shouldn't be worried about. Based upon my experience working on campaigns, however, turning in those 1,500 fraudulent signatures is actually worse than not turning in any signatures whatsoever.

I say this because campaigns are always double checking their signatures. In fact, they usually have someone whose responsibility it is to put the signatures collected into a database. This not only helps the campaign keep track of how many signatures they have, and from where, but it also makes sure they don't count Jane Doe from Chantilly multiple times. (As most of you know, it's easy to forget if you've already signed for a candidate when you're asked to sign at almost every political event you attend before the deadline. As a result, some people sign multiple times for a candidate without realizing it).

While someone is entering in all that data, they usually can notice when there's something fishy about the signatures. I know I've been suspicious when I've seen 4 or 5 in a row that all seem to be written in similar handwriting. Or when there seems to be a lot of discrepancies with the signatures submitted by one person. Usually it's nothing, but you still take note and I often would at least ask another staffer for their opinion just to be safe. It therefore seems HIGHLY unlikely that a campaign doing an even halfway decent job of monitoring their signature collection would be able to miss 1,500 fraudulent signatures. The statewide party, after all, was able to pick up on it rather quickly.

So what this ultimately means is that either Gingrich's campaign is even more careless than we originally thought and couldn't spot an enormous amount of fraud being conducted by their own employee, or they simply thought they could get away with submitting the fake signatures. Either way, it doesn't look speak well of Gingrich's ability of surrounding himself with people who can be trusted to do a job honestly and extremely well -- something he'd have to do if he were elected president.