The latest email from the John Bonifaz campaign contains the following warning (emphasis in original):
We have good and bad news on the signature collection front. The good news is that we are almost halfway to our goal of 10,000 signatures…. The bad news is that the deadline is May 9th, and we are currently not on pace to reach our goal. We need to expand the team, and people have to step up NOW.
There has been a great deal of yakkity-yak here and elsewhere about whether the candidates will get the required 15% of delegates at the June convention. But that is not the only hurdle the candidates face in getting on the ballot. The signature requirements are significant, and candidates always have to over-collect in order to allow for the inevitable disqualifications resulting from the state’s fairly draconian laws on this subject (as a candidate for Secretary of State, Bonifaz needs 5,000 signatures – he’s apparently set 10,000 as the goal in order to make sure he has 5,000 that are valid).
Anyone have any intel on how the Governor and Lt. Governor candidates are doing? They need 10,000 to qualify, which means they’d be smart to collect a couple thousand more than that. That’s a lot of signatures.
Reilly’s sure to get his. Patrick by this point has enough in hand to clear the bar. Gabrieli and Mihos are paying people to collect, so they’ll have plenty. Not sure about Healey, but I assume she’ll have no trouble.
LG, I have no idea, but I’ve seen people collecting at various events. My hunch is that all of them manage to somehow clear the bar, but it will be interesting to see the order they come in at.
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As for everyone else, one funny thing that I heard is that Kevin Scott, Republican candidate for US Senate, is having trouble getting the 10,000 to get on the ballot against Ted Kennedy. I’m not sure that he realizes that he can get the signatures of unenrolled voters as well as registered Republicans.
I guess the good news is, if every single one of those signatures is ruled valid, Bonifaz already has enough. Of course that won’t happing, but it means at this point he’s collecting for the margin of error.
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When I coordinated a signature drive in 2004, for an anti-Patriot Act public policy question, our requirement was 200 signatures per district to get on the ballot in that district. We set a 25% buffer goal, of 250 signatures. There was only one district in which we turned in more than 200 but less than 250 – the 27th Middlesex (then Pat Jehlen’s, now Denise Provost’s). We turned in 241, but Somerville certified only about 160 of them! That suggests that even if we’d made our goal of 250, we’d still have been short.
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In the 3rd Berkshire (Pittsfield) they initially turned in 246 and got 167 of those certified. Then it turned out they had 36 more from a different group, 30 of which got certified, for a total of 197 certified out of 282 turned in – which shows that a 25% buffer wasn’t quite enough, and a 50% buffer probably was. We had a happy ending to that one, though. Our volunteers in the 3rd Berkshire saw that some of the uncertified signatures came from people they personally knew or could identify, who were eligible, so they got those people to go to the Pittsfield city clerk to say “yes, that’s me, that’s my signature”, and managed to get 3 more signatures certified. So we did get on the ballot in the 3rd Berkshire, but just barely.
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Based on our experience in 2004, I’d say 10,000 is the right goal to strive for, but 7,500 is very likely enough to get on the ballot. And 6,500 would be skating the edge. However, it’s possible the percentages will be easier for a statewide candidate. One of our big problems, particularly in urban districts like the 27th Middlesex, was getting people to sign for the correct district. We had a number of signatures invalidated on each petition for being out of district. For a statewide candidate, all you need to do is sign the petition for the correct city or town, and hardly anyone is confused about which city or town they live in đŸ™‚
If the Green and Libertarian party candidates can do it every four years, not to mention Barbara Johnson and her gang last go around, the signature requirements can’t be that difficult to achieve.
Gathering signatures are a sign of organization. Perhaps Mr. Bonifaz isn’t that organized?