that that would be an argument in his favor. I don’t know how you can argue against signature verification, which was something the VA GOP was supposed to be doing all along, but never did until this year. The former VA GOP chair, that was in office during the 2008 election season, stated publically that the signatures were not verified against the State Election database in 2008. They checked that the forms had all the proper notary seals, and signatures of those gather the signatures, but the individual signatures were not verified. That was the big change this year, the signatures were in fact checked on the database. The past GOP chair said that if a candidate submitted 10,000 signatures, they were considered to have met the requirement.

I would be interested to see if some that were in the verification room that day were called before the judge to testify as to what they saw. One guy said he saw some of the volunteers throw out pages and pages of signatures because some kind of info at the top of the page was considered incorrect by the volunteer, even though it was not a valid reason for invalidation. He also said that some of the volunteers were elderly, and not computer savy. They had a hard time trying to verify the signatures on the database, and could have invalidated some signatures wrongly. I don’t know that that will happen though because it doesn’t appear to be a part of Perry’s lawsuit. Someone has got to find out who the volunteers were, and if they were a majority of supporters of another candidate. I did read that Jerry Kilgore, Perry’s VA chair will be testifying in court.